


Part of Me You Carry

by IndytheWonderful



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alice is a little beat up at the beginning of this just a warning, Alice is a smartass and dealing with her trauma through jokes okay she's doing her best, Amnesia, F/M, Jasper WHY are you so afraid of your wife, Just cute things like bleeding out in the back of a truck :), Memory Loss, Now featuring brief cameos from both Bellas pov and Jaspers pov, The Bastard AKA Alice's stupid sewing machine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2019-11-13 17:59:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18036176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndytheWonderful/pseuds/IndytheWonderful
Summary: And part of me is gone.(But you've got a heart so big,it could crush this town.And I can't hold out forevereven walls fall down.)When Alice shakes up the small town of Forks, Washington by turning up half-dead in the back of a semi truck, it seems that nothing will ever be the same. But she carries secrets she doesn't even know. What is up with the Cullens? What happened to her, and why can't she remember anything? Who is the blonde angel that haunts her mysterious visions?How far will Alice go to find her angel? How long can he bear to hide?





	1. Prologue

Bella wakes up to someone rummaging through the drawers of her dresser in the middle of the night.

She hastily flips on the lamp next to her bed, flying upright in alarm. “Charlie?” She cries, and the jacketed figure in front of her freezes. “What the hell?”

He looks at her, wild like a deer caught in headlights, and then continues his search.

“Dad!” She yells, and springs from bed. He doesn’t react at all to her yelling, and she reaches out for his arm. He pauses, cold to the touch, when she wraps her fingers as far around his wrist as they’ll go. “Dad, what’s going on?”

“I need clothes.” His voice is hoarse with sleep. He’s dressed for work in his police uniform—and a quick glance at her alarm clock tells her its 2:04 AM—with his shirt buttoned up wrong and untucked.

“Woah dad, slow down.” She wishes he would sit down; she tugs him to sit in the chair, but he doesn’t budge. “Why do you need my clothes?”

Charlie’s whole body collapses in on itself. “There’s a girl Bells, and she’s in real trouble.” There’s a look in his eyes, one that she remembers all too well.

It’s one she saw often enough; sitting on the edge of this very same bed six months ago with her leg in a cast, fresh from a collision with Tyler’s black van in the school parking lot. It came with constant watching, arranged driving to school for weeks, her staying home afterschool every day and family friends watching her, all day every day all the time. The ice packs and burnt soup and the fuzzy socks he brought home in such great quantities that she’d had to clear out a whole drawer for them.

Understanding breaks through her delirious, half-asleep haze. “Okay dad, just tell me what happened and I can find her something, okay?” He shakes his head, but doesn’t resume his digging. His hands are clenched into fists and practically vibrating with tension.

“A trucker at the station down the road.” She filled her giant antique of a red truck there yesterday afterschool. “He just… found her, sitting there. Bleeding all over the place.”

Bella pushes him out of the way with her shoulder, and hunts around for and old sweatshirt and PJ pants. “Is she alive?”

“I hope.” Charlie never ‘hopes’. Things are or they aren’t for him and it’s that simple.

Her finger close on the old Phoenix sweatshirt and flannel pants she stole from her giant of a best friend Jake, and she bundles them into a ball and shoves it into Charlie’s waiting arms.

“Bells.” He says quietly, and she turns to face him. “She’s in real bad shape.”

In that moment, Bella feels fate for the second time in her life. There is a ribbon between her and her father; ever since her move here two years ago it’s been like they were the same person, with their quiet personalities and love of space. She is a sympathetic person, a crier, and tears are pushing at her eyes. There is something so broken in Charlie’s simple sad words. He is looking at the girl and seeing her, Bella, propped up in the back of an 18-wheeler and bleeding out. Her dad is the police chief, and in this small town, tragedy is rare. There is another ribbon inside of her now, not as strong as the ribbon that connects her to Charlie or the one from that fateful day last spring, but a small sliver of a connection that she must protect. It’s her fight too.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Bells, they called Carlisle to-scene.” That means a dead person, if the doctor isn’t even going to the hospital at all.

She finds a line of strength in her voice, and directs it at Charlie in what may well be the first demand she’d ever made of him. “You have to let me come.”

He says nothing, but turns and hurries down the stairs. Bella grabs a pair of converse and two of Charlie’s jackets, then the car is pulling out of the driveway with sirens blaring and lights blazing in seconds.


	2. All That Are Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice wakes up in the hospital, and discovers something strange about her doctor. Well, when she has time not taken up by the all the visions.
> 
> Song: Toi plus Moi (Gregoire) (Sorry, it's in french!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what??? It's finally time for us to meet Alice! I hope nobody is too disappointed to hear that the prologue is the only chapter that takes place in Bella's POV. From here on out it's all Alice, all the time.

There is desperation in her, burning and violent. The sad kind, that makes her joints ache and burn; the kind that makes her feel stretched and violent. So, so violent. She could kill someone. She feels like the fangs at her neck are growing everywhere on her body like an infection.

She could bite the world off in one clean clench of her jaws.

“You will live, love.” Says a voice. All her body is on fire; she is burning too hot and too quick. Something is wrong. The malevolent sort of wrong that steals infants from the arms of their mothers in the middle of the night and steals pretty girls out of darkened streets at night. It smells heavy, like death and magnolias. How desperately she prays to the unspoken thing above her that she wrestles with for her life. What life? What has she lived? All that she is can be summed in the sensation of fire; so hot it’s cold.“Oh Alice,” in the midst of the flames, she opens her eyes to the lure of the low southern voice. An angel, a blond angel scarred and broken, has crawled into her grave with her. She wants to reach out and pet his hair, for his grief is as potent to her as anything she feels, but she cannot move. He presses his cold face to her chest, where no breath enters. Shudders wrack his scarred body, his cheeks cut from slabs of moonstone and too clear, too translucent, too jagged and broken. “Oh Alice,” he whispers, no tears on his monstrously beautiful face. “I wish I didn’t want this.”She dies.

 

Alice is very cold, and very stiff. She fells kind of like she was shoved through a blender with the top off and splattered everywhere.

She groans.

“Hello?” Calls a soft male voice, and she squishes her sleepy face together. Her mouth is filled with sand; her whole body has been laying in a desert for days and she’s been covered in the shifting sand dunes by rough winds.

“Hurgh,” She groans again. “Ugh.” It’s the only thing she can do right now.

“Water?” Kindly asks the man. Nothing has ever sounded better to her.

“Ahh.”

The cool drink seems like the elixir of life; in moments, she can taste that she hasn’t brushed her teeth in way too long—wow, she hadn’t even realized she couldn’t taste for a minute there—and smell the antiseptic smells of a hospital. The lids of her eyes still won’t lift, not for lack of trying. She’s wrinkling her face up like a prune trying.

“I’m Dr. Cullen, and you’re in the hospital.” Well duh, she can smell the overpowering, chemically clean, place even in her semi-functional state.“Hi.” She grunts out. Her chest feels heavy and oddly empty. It takes too much air for her to say such a simple thing—she’s actually winded. Her inhale sounds like a rusty truck backfiring, and she promptly hacks out all the burning sand.

The coughing continues, and she jolts upright. Her eyes water as if to quench the fire in every other part of her. The water pushes them open in a harsh world of white and fluorescent lights. There is no sand coming out of her. There is nothing coming out of her, she can’t get in a gasping breath before another hack tears through her. A cold, hard something hits her on the back.

Once, twice, it hits her just as she begins a fit and pushes the air out faster.

Stars swim in her eyes.

Cold hands tip her back onto the bed. Her mouth is held open.

She hopes silently that no-one ever has to have their mouth held open while they’re coughing, because it just feels like she’s gagging and choking all at the same time. Then one hand is pinning her jaw open and the other is shoving something down her throat. It is worse than choking with her mouth open.

The tube—because it it’s either a tube or someone is shoving a cold iron rod into her—reaches a deep part of her chest. She falls entirely still.

She does not breath.

And then, just when her vision is gone and she can no longer taste the staleness of her mouth, air rushes into her lungs like inhaling in the middle of a snow storm. So cold, but the kind of internal cleanse that can only be found in sub-zero climates.

Alice lays there for a long time, swallowing every few moments to get a sense of her new tube.

“Are you feeling better?” Asks the doctor after a long time.

“Yes.” Her voice is thinned. The tube takes up space where she would normally be able to produce sound.

“I’m Carlisle Cullen, your doctor.” What an old-fashioned name.

“Okay.” She is fine with that. Doctors are good. Hospitals are fairly bad, but right now she’s looking for positives. Reasonable thought is coming back to her in spits and spasms, like she’s seizing her way back to the land of the living. Right now, she is pushing aside some vague looming fear in favour of not thinking too much. There is a thunderstorm of panic lurking in the back of her head, but it’s mushed between her head and the plastic-y hospital sheets, safely pushed out of the way. She is curious though, about where she is. And why she hurts so much. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the Port Angeles Hospital.” Calmly answers Dr. Cullen.

She nods. None of those words mean anything to her.

Before she can ask, Dr. Cullen is filling her in. “You’re in rough shape. You’ve been out for two days—please don’t worry, that was medical sedatives—and are currently waking up from a heavy dose of anaesthesia. Are you in any pain?”

“I can’t really feel my legs. Or arms.” Her voice is high and very thin.

“Loss of kinaesthetic sense is completely normal.” He reassures her, and she nods like she knows what ‘kinaesthetic sense’ is.

“I have a few questions,” he begins, and then hesitates. She looks at him for the first time, and gasps. He’s beautiful, like he stepped out of a rococo painting and into the white light of the hospital. His skin is white and perfectly smooth, his eyes are golden like warm liquid honey, and his hair is golden too, just a shade fairer than his eyes. “what is your name?”

 

A marble statue missing an arm, broken clean at the shoulder. “Alice!” he shouts, and springs to life to run to her.

 

 Thankfully the tube is breathing for her, because she is utterly entranced by the diamond-like glimmer on the skin of the statue. “A-Alice.” She stutters out.

“Alright Alice, what is your surname?” That’s odd, she can’t remember. When she thinks, her head just echoes back ‘Alice’ over and over.

“I don’t think I know.” The thundercloud is coming closer.

 She sits up, and it leaps from its confines to swarm around her head.

She cannot remember anything.

There is nothing in her head, nothing like a big black void staring at her from the screen of a dead TV. She is utterly alone in this hospital bed. She cannot place a single bit of her life; there is no spark of family and no scenes of her at school—she feels like she’s about that age—and wow, she doesn’t even know how old she is! This is very bad, but oddly, she is feeling very different. Very… away from herself. As if she floated up and away from her body, up into the ceiling where she’s hanging out with the ghosts that live there. Her and the ghosts.

She could be a ghost right now. Maybe she died and this is what the afterlife looks like—no Heaven, no Hell, just the angel of the doctor and infinite hospital beds. Dr. Cullen is definitely an angel with his infinite beauty and utterly white skin. He’s like the marble statues of biblical scenes.

Suddenly, everything is black

 

Her, sitting on the floor of a big room, reading a book of pictures. Someone tall and cold is sitting next to her. His voice rumbles in her ear, indistinct but warm. His hand slides into the curve of her back and pulls her into him. She giggles, the sound high and pure like the tinkling of a bell. She tips off her knees and into the lap of the cross-legged man, who she looks up at with a glowing heart and pure adoration. He is carved from vein-less marble. Perfectly white and blond, chin-length curls reaching for her face below his. He is scarred like the side of a mountain; scarring like chips in stone running all over his face, his strong jaw, his furrowed brow, running down the tendons in his neck. He is roughhewn. His lips are like crushed roses.

She is in love.

There is sunlight streaming through a big glass wall behind her. Alice reaches up to tuck the curtain of blond waves behind his ear, and he gives her the slightest of smiles. Then he falls utterly still.

His skin (if you could even call it a weak word like skin) is illuminated like a diamond. Broken and cracked over each and every scar, like looking dead on into the sea of faucets in the centre of a well-cut diamond, the perfect centrepiece of a wedding ring. She longs to reach out and sooth them all, run her fingers down the side of his strong face and ease the creases from his forehead, wash the scars and their stories away with the pads of her fingers.

There’s a ring on her finger. She can feel it, cold like the man that holds her, so gently, hands sliding up under her back to lift her, up, up, up to meet him—so close to his lips…

 

Alice blinks back into the hospital.

“Dr. Cullen,” She says very seriously. “I think I just had a vision.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

Alice is promptly hooked up to an EKG and then promptly declared sane. Dr. Cullen doesn’t seem too worried about her, and if she could form proper sentences around him she’d voice her concern. She mumbles a lot about her head and arms and everything hurting, but he thinks she’s fine. At least her mind is fine.

She sees the blond angel around every corner. He haunts her like a ghost, like her own personal demon. He watches her when she sleeps and talks, small fragments that she never remembers for long enough, when her visions come. All alone in the white, she clings to him for the colour in his amber eyes. It might be the hospital making her insane, but it could very well be the look in his eyes as he cried out her name.

Dr. Cullen comes in to visit her every night, taking little ten minute breaks from his never-ending stream of patients in the ER. She asks him once why he works here.

“I can help people,” he responds, smiling up at her from over his clipboard. “I’d live here, if I could.” His voice is tinged with regret.

“You seem to.” Alice replies, fiddling with the edge of the blanket. “This blanket, it’s…” but she trails off in the middle of her sentence, words lost to her. The sensation is unpleasant, the blanket rough, but she cannot describe what it does to her skin. The word is misty in her head, something like irritating or unkind. “It’s rough, it makes my skin red. What’s the word for that?” She looks at Dr. Cullen with wide eyes.

“Irritating?” He offers, but she shakes her head.

“No, not quite.” Alice shakes her head, trying to dislodge the fog. “Ugh, I know you said my brain is fine, but I don’t feel very ‘fine’.”

Dr. Cullen gently sets down his clipboard on the foot of her bed, and joins her on the bed, sitting next to her. “It’s not uncommon to feel lost and confused, Alice. I’m genuinely surprised that you are doing as well as you are—it’s remarkable that you’re not more troubled.”

She shoots him an unimpressed look. “Thanks, Dr. Cullen.”

He sighs, and reaches out to tap one of the worse scabs on the side of her neck. “Alice, you are a very strong young lady.” Her back stiffens, and she fades from the present.

 

“You… are trying to fight me?” Her blond angel questions, brows furrowed in the half-light of dawn in the living room with the big glass wall. They dragged in a couch from another room to fill the usually open space, a big and cushiony thing that she is currently perched perilously on the arm of. She teeters when she sticks her arm to wave a rolled-up magazine at him.

“On guard!” Alice shouts gleefully.

She blinks, and he is right in front of her, smirking. “Oh really, Alice?” He drawls, looking down at her with a predatory expression. She breaths deeply, but it only serves to fill her mind with the heady scent of magnolias and gunpowder, gunmetal. She sways even further.

“What was I doing?” She blinks up at him, thoughts completely scattered. He sweeps her off her feet in one instantaneous movement, his inhuman grace and strength lending him the effortless power to seduce her. Pressed into his neck like this, she wishes she would lean up and bite him, nibble on that delicious marble line, make her own mark on his marble skin. Instead, she smiles and kisses him softly. He pulls her into his chest, trotting off to the kitchen and rocking her slightly the whole way. Staying up the whole night is taking its toll—her eyes are sleepy, her former quest to fight him now diverted by her mission to stave off sleeping.

“Stop it.” Alice swats his chest. “Don’t make me sleepy.” The delirium of tiredness increases, and she whacks him harder. “Ow.” Hitting the marble man, very smart of her. 

“You’ll regret it later if you don’t rest now.” He warns.

“I like watching you when the sun comes up.” She mutters, not ashamed in the least. “You glitter.”

He tenses, hard skin becoming ridged with tendons tense. “It’s not natural.” In his anger, he accidentally lets the wave of sleepiness he’s been pressing on her go.

Her brow furrows. “So?”

He chuckles and sets her on the counter of the kitchen, cool marble against the bare skin of her legs below her shorts. It makes goose bumps appear on her arms. Her hold, arms around her neck in such a natural way she had forgotten they were even there, tightens. She likes being held. “The counter is cold.” She whispers.

“Not me?” He asks, beginning to extract himself from her grip.

“No.” She pulls him in, and for all his strength, he is powerless against the warmth of her leg, brushing up against his waist and her hand running down the side of his face. The love (and lust) that she radiates must be making him dizzy, slowing his reactions. “You were next to me on the sofa; you’re warm,” her hand pulls under his jaw and urges him down to her level so the next words are muttered a hairsbreadth from his perfect rosy lips. “just like me.” He grins, and it pulls up the corners of her mouth in tandem with his.

“I used to be strong.” he breaths out. “How stupid.”

 

“Alice? Alice, are you alright?” She shakes off the moment with a wave of her hand.

“Yes, fine. Dizzy. Can I have some water?”

“Of course,” he says, already pressing the glass into her hands. It’s real glass.

“This is glass?” She glances at him curiously. “I thought the hospital only had paper cups?”

He ducks his head. “I brought it in.” Alice twists the glass in her hand, admiring the cut of the crystal and the rainbows it cast on her hand. “It looks like you’ll be with us for a while, and you should feel welcome.”

            Her eyes are a little misty. Somehow, it means more than the blue blankets that pool around her as she shifts. Something nice, something that she doesn't  _need_. When Dr. Cullen had seen the redness on her skin from the hospital blankets, he'd frowned and returned less than twelve hours later with a great pile of blankets and told her to choose one for that week. She'd picked blue. Blue was a calming colour, one of the nurses told her. “Thanks, Dr. Cullen. It’s really pretty.”

“My wife, Esme, picked them out.” He chuckles. “It was her idea, to bring you a piece of home.”

“She sounds lovely.” Alice says wistfully. It must be nice to be in love like that. Not like her and her blond; though he held her so close, he is always just at the edge of her reality in the here and now.

“She is. I’ll have to tell her you like the crystal.” Alice tips the rest of the glass back, downing the water in one gulp. “Are you feeling better? Dizziness passed?”

Alice nods. “It’s funny, I keep having these visions. I think it might be my life before—there’s this blond man, he’s so handsome, and we’re so in love.” The loneliness is tangible in her words. “Every time it happens, I wish it would stay. I wish I lived there, I wish I was there now.”

Dr. Cullen’s face is creased with lines of worry, carved into his perfect skin and rococo face. She looks back at the wall in front of her, not seeing it. “His name is Jasper. If I did run away, I was a fool.” Even as her lips form the words, Alice knows there’s no way she could ever leave such a place. “I just had this lovely dream—he carried me through a gorgeous house, with a whole wall made of glass.” She waves her hands in front of her, like the reflections on the glass of the wall. “I told him I was going to fight him—but I wasn’t, not really—and he just laughed and picked me up. His skin glitters in the sun.” She frowns, not making sense of that one odd and unnatural detail. “I wanted to watch it when the sun came up.”

“Alice.” Dr. Cullen says, breaking her reverie. He had gone so still beside her that she had forgotten him entirely. “What did the house look like?”

She loses herself, just for a moment. Imagining that the blue cotton sheets around her are the waters of the great wide seas, and her and her angel are sailing away. Somewhere safe and warm, where the sun always shines. The sun never comes through her window in the hospital. If she didn’t like her room, which housed all the little things that she’d grown friendly with (the crack in the wall that she swore spread every day, the chip on one floor tile, the nurses’ schedule she’s memorized) and she didn’t want to start over again. In a strange room, where she had no memories.

Of all the things that her vision might tell him, she doubted that the colour of the floors would be important. “It was all light, the floors done in cherry or walnut.” Her lips curl into a smile. “We dragged a big leather couch to the glass wall. It was so perfect I didn’t want to go to sleep—so he used some sort of magic, or powers, or something, to make me tired.” She looks at Dr. Cullen and smiles sardonically. “Crazy, isn’t it.”

The expression on his face stops her. He looks… scared. “Alice, I’m sorry.” And he stands, a little too quickly. Like her love, in her vision. “I need to… file my papers, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He is gone from the room before she can say a word. Did she do something wrong? Dr. Cullen had just declared her sane, and sound; was this vision, the magic and the strange powers of her handsome man so strange to him? Had something she said been wrong? Been too much, to odd, for him to handle? He hadn’t even taken the paper he needed—the brown clipboard looks at her accusingly from the foot of her bed.

Alice pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around herself.

“You left your clipboard.” She tells the empty doorway.

 

 

* * *

 

Dr. Cullen makes himself rather scarce after that, at least for a few days. Alice, the potent combination of bored and lonely that only leads to bad decisions, takes to hiding around the hospital to avoid the endless sea of painkillers and pills that she is given. For someone supposedly healing, she takes enough pills to make her feel like she’s still on the verge of death.

Naturally, she ends up hearing some things she’d rather not, in hindsight, be privy to.

She’s in a janitor’s closet, hiding from her daily dose of painkillers, when she sees him. Dr. Cullen is talking on his phone, a sleek silver thing, save for the case proudly printed with a photo of his family. She can make out four tall men—two blonds, a redhead, and a brunet, with a slightly shorter blond girl and a tiny light brunette, who Alice would bet is Dr. Cullen’s wife. She, and the blond man she guesses is the doctor himself, are in the centre of the photo. Alice tries not to be jealous, really, but it wells up in her regardless.

“Esme, love.” The doctor says with relief when she answers the phone. He is pacing—something that humanizes him, for Alice has never seen him falter or be bothered. “Is Jasper there?”

Esme responds, but the sound is lost to her.

“Good, please try to keep him at the house. I worry, love—she knows things, things that she shouldn’t know. Edward would have known, had he left in the last few years?” He wrinkles his face. “Right, of course, we’d all know. She can’t be older than sixteen, and the memories seem… romantic. It would have been recent.” He nods, and a long pause follows. “Of course. He avoids the hospital, but Edward said that he was thinking of here often, like something was calling to him. He said that Jasper was contemplating some sort of ‘pull’ to here,” Dr. Cullen looks very, very, pained. He breaths deeply. “Esme, it was different for us.”

Alice sticks her head a little further out into the hall, desperate to here Esme’s response. Jasper, the name of her love. The man who gave her the name she bears, who gave her everything that she has now. She understands it could mean nothing—the thought stings her deep in her heart, a place she tries to guard to no avail—but she wishes, how she wishes, that her Jasper was close.

“Just… be careful. You know that he is not as well practiced as we are.” Damnit, she missed something! The doctor is smiling now, like his worries are all gone. “I love you, I cannot wait to be home.” Then, he ends the call and heads down the hall. Just when he rounds the corner and evades her line of sight, Alice sprints back to her room.

She spots her angel around the corner, and pauses to spare him a wave and smile. Without him, all the lonely in her would come crashing down at once and she'd be so sad. He staves off the worst of her worrying as she scuttle back into her safe little room, but one question never leaves her.

Just what is the doctor keeping from her?


	3. Can't Go On, No, I'll Go On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice receives a visitor at the hospital.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Chapter Two!! I hope you all enjoy this-- it goes a little deeper into the problems that Alice is having (her life has certainly not been easy, poor thing!) and also begins introducing some of the Forks population!
> 
> Song: In a Drawer (Band of Horses)

Despite her troubles (and Dr. Cullen’s worry), in a month Alice is up and running about underfoot, driving the nurses and doctors slowly insane with her constant quest for entertainment. She’s annoying enough that they hand her to the police and suddenly her days are filled with statement after statement. Endlessly telling them that she doesn’t know what her name is, doesn’t know why she was unconscious and nearly dead in the back of a truck, doesn’t know why she’s got head trauma bad enough to knock out her whole damn memory, and she really doesn’t know anything about where she came from, gets old soon. 

At least most of the local police seem to like her well enough. 

Dr. Cullen talks to her a lot. Mostly about how he’s surprised she’s not in shock. It seems pretty simple to her: if she can’t get her memories back, why should she worry about it? There are a lot of things that she needs to worry about. How, for instance, the stitches up the back of her head are itchy. And that she’s technically homeless with, in a very literal sense, no-one to turn to for help. Still, most pressing is that no-one understands that she’s only ever seen the hospital and a hospital-window-sized chunk of Port Angeles, and that’s quite unfair.

No time to worry right now; the doctor is back, and she sits up to turn and smile at him. 

“Hi Dr. Cullen.” 

He beams back at her. She misses her breathing tube. He makes recovery so hard, all dazzling smiles and bright eyes and perfect kindness. “Hello, Miss Alice.” 

She glances at the clock, which determinedly refuses to speed up and let her hour of TV come. “You’re early today, doc. What’s up?” 

He lingers in the doorway. Something suspicious is happening. “You have a visitor.”  
She wrinkles up her nose. More police, of course. “More police? How many ways can I say that I don’t remember anything? I’m going to start telling them stories, just so that they can write something different down.” She winks, and the doctor gives her an indulgent half smile. “Think they’d believe me, if I told them I was a mad scientist loose from an insane asylum?”

“No more late-night movies.” Dr. Cullen shakes his head, and she pouts. She liked the creepy old black-and-white movies. Her life felt black-and-white, it was nice to see that romanticised. “The police chief from Forks is here to see you.” 

“And that’s different because…?” 

“He was first to arrive on-scene.” 

Alice still wrinkles her nose. “Do I really have to give another statement? It’s not like I can tell him anything that the other cops haven’t already got.” 

He walks to the edge of her bed and sits down. She peers around him into the hall, and unsurprisingly there’s the blurry form of a beige police uniform at the end of the hall, loitering by the elevators. He doesn’t move much or even shuffle around; he is standing at the door, tensed and nervous, staring at the floor. 

“He might be able to tell you something Alice.” 

“Like what? I don’t even know my own name, doctor; I really don’t think that he knows anything more than me.” He reaches out and pats her back gently with his icy and infinitely gentle hands. 

“I know. He might not know anything, but it would mean a lot if you talked to him.” Then the doctor slumps just a little. His posture doesn’t change, but there are suddenly years in his face that make him look as if he’d seen hundreds of years go by in the last second. “Alice, I’ve known Chief Swan since my family and I moved to this town. He’s a good man. And, the gas station where you were found is three minutes from his home.” Though compassionate, the doctor seems lonely. This is the first non-familial tie she’s heard him mention. 

“I’ll try.” She finds herself promising. 

Dr. Cullen hits her with the full force of his blinding smile. “That’s all I could ask for.” Then he rises soundlessly from the bed. He pauses, one foot in and one foot out, of the door and looks back at her, marble skin creased with worry lines. “He has a daughter about your age. She moved here three years ago.” 

Oh. That changes things. 

Alice quickly ruffles her hair over her ears and the left side of her face, where the worst of the bleeding and scabbing is. The stitches on the back of her skull are fine, but she carefully pushes up further in the bed, crossing her battered legs and then pulling the starchy white sheets over the bruises. She smiles, but it pulls the corners of her mouth too much. She tries again, extra sure to wrinkle her eyes. 

Alice can’t remember her own family, but she has a pretty good grasp on how they work. It’s like she was filled up with textbook knowledge of the world—math and science and words, how to speak and smile and eat—but never did any of it herself. Dr. Cullen calls it shock. So, no, she doesn’t have her own family. But the doctor looked so sad when he told her about Chief Swan, so sad when he mentioned the daughter that had recently come to live with him. There’s a story behind that she’s sure, but the man at the end of the hall didn’t look dangerous. He looked middle-aged and worried. How would she feel if someone, who resembled someone she loved, showed up broken and bleeding right down the road? 

She gets the smile right, or at least she thinks she does, on the third try. 

There is a soft knock on the edge of her open door. 

“Come in!” She calls brightly. It might be interesting to meet a real father. Dr. Cullen mentioned kids, but he couldn’t be more than in his late twenties. 

“Hello.” The chief looks the same as he did down the hall, moustached and middle-aged. His hair is black-coffee-brown, greying slightly around his face. He looks like he hasn’t slept in three days. He pulls off his hat, and steps hesitantly into the white room. 

“Are you chief Swan?” His eyes widen. She’s quick to reassure him. “Dr. Cullen told me you were coming.” 

“Dr. Cullen is a good doctor.” 

“Yup!” She chirps. “I feel way better already. Almost good as new actually.” 

Some of the tension drains from the chief’s shoulders. “Thank god.” 

“Do you want to sit down? If you’re here to take a statement though, don’t bother. I could tell you everything I know in about thirty seconds.” She grins. The chief looks horrified. He sits down anyways, and pulls out a little reporter’s notebook and an old black pen. 

“I’ve read the statements form Port Angeles PD.” He looks at her expectantly. 

Alice shrugs hopelessly. “I woke up in the hospital feeling like I got hit by a truck. I think my name is Alice.” She does not, however, include how she knows this. Or that she is certain of that fact. Or that late at night, when she’s too tired to remember her name, the angel visits her. “Dr. Cullen then told me I probably did get hit by a truck. I don’t know how I got in the back of said truck, or where I’m from, or how old I am. I do know that I’m hungry.” She flashes him a grin, pausing in her quick, rehearsed, speech. “And that’s it! I’m almost all healed up. Dr. Cullen says I’ll get my stitches out in a month. Nothing is broken.”  
Chief Swan just looks at her like he’s missing something, and its location is in between her brows.  
She keeps talking. He has not written anything down. “They did all the tests—every acronym you can think of, every sci-fi experiment—and Dr. Cullen just thinks that I hit my head hard enough to knock all my memories right out. Of course, there’s also the whole trauma thing.” 

He blinks. All the blood has left his face.

Alice takes it upon herself to elaborate. “Something bad must’ve happened for me to be bleeding out in the back of a truck.” He winces. “Oh, sorry. Dr. Cullen told me you had a daughter, that was insensitive.” 

“It’s fine.” 

“Is there anything else I can help with?” And she really does want to help. The more she helps the more likely they are to help her; therefore, she should do her best. 

“No.” Then he sits there for a long while, staring at her. She fingers the ends of her short hair nervously. It’s choppy and nearly cut to her scalp in spots. Considering the cuts on her arms and one very bad one on the back of her neck, it was most likely hacked off. Alice knows she should be horrified by these things, but she is deeply thankful for everything that she has the fortune to know. She memorizes the nurses’ rounds and the sound of Dr. Cullen velvet voice. She could draw, blindfold, the middle button on Chief Swan’s shirt, sewn on differently than the others. “This is…” he shakes his head. “This is the worst thing to happen to Forks in twenty years.” 

“Sorry?” 

“Bears and hunters shooting themselves. That’s what happens here. Not… not this.” Guilt is crushing her. Poor Chief Swan, worrying up all night about a stranger like her. 

Alice leans over and places a hand on his shoulder, nearly toppling from the bed in the process. “It’ll be okay, I promise. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it!” 

That breaks him from his downcast mood suddenly. “What?” 

“I mean, I’m healing and I’ll be fine in a few weeks. Then Forks can go back to normal.” 

He looks even worse than before. “No.” Another head shake. “Don’t worry. I’m going to fix this.” That’s a promise both to her and himself. 

Several deep breaths leave the chief before he can say anything else. “You need somewhere to go. I’ve talked to the feds. They want you in a safe environment. Since you’re not legally an adult,” Nobody knows that for sure. “I’m looking places for you.” 

“Thanks!” Finding her way out of the hospital sounds very good. And she’d like to replace some of her textbook knowledge with the real thing. 

She cuts out of the world.

 

“Charlie!” Alice yells up the narrow steps, shoving errant chunks of her growing-out hair behind her ears. “Dinner is ready! It’s lasagne!” 

“Alice, it’s not going to be ready for fifteen minutes! What about the salad?” A female voice calls from the kitchen behind her. 

“Oh Bella, don’t you want to talk to Charlie while we’re cooking? We can tell him about the dresses in Port Angeles!” The girl, Bella, groans and pushes her face into the palm of her tomato sauce splattered hands. A curtain of cherry-wood hair, loosely curling at the edges, swings around to engulf her. She looks right at home in the out-dated kitchen with its white refrigerator and bright, sunny yellow cabinets. 

“I don’t want to hear any more about dresses Alice. Can’t I just cook in peace?” 

Alice runs back into the kitchen, footsteps light in her socked feet. “Beauty never sleeps!” She cries, waving her spoon and ready for battle. “I still have to alter that dress!” 

Bella lets out a groan and sinks to the floor. 

 

Alice blinks back to the present day. Was that her old family? 

“Are you alright?” Chief Swan is hovering over her, one hand pressed to her forehead. 

Her head feels like cotton balls. Stuffed with cotton balls, bursting at the seams. Should she call for Dr. Cullen? This seems like a doctor sort of thing. Visions are not good. 

“I think I just got a little dizzy. Could you please pass me a glass of water?” She asks as politely as she can, given that her head is up in the sky and her body feels like lead. 

The chief presses a plastic hospital cup of lukewarm water to her lips, and just like when she first awoke, the liquid worked like magic to revive her. 

“I’ll come back later,” he says as he sets the cup down on the little table next to her bed. Just as Dr. Cullen did, he retreats from the room and stops in the door. She can see him clearer now. It’s dark in her room—he must’ve turned out the lights in her dizzy spell—and in the contrast from the hall, the youth that had left him is echoed, in the clean line of his jaw and the black still in his hair. Streaks of grey just look like the glow of the fluorescents. “Thank you, Alice.” 

Her heart warms, and she beams back around the lump in her throat. 

 

Six hours later, Carlisle is crouching on the floor across her room, baiting her with open palms and his kindest smile. “Alice,” he lures. “what is it?” 

She cannot do more than shake her head, crushing the skull above her shoulders between her hands. It doesn’t feel like her head. It feels like nothing, it feels empty, it feels crushing and heavy and she wants it gone like she has never hated anything before. She is aware of the trembling of her body, of the ache that is settling into her shoulders from tensing for so long. Aware that she is still too thin and her shoulder blades knock together, and they will bruise. Aware she that she pulled the lamp from the wall and hit herself in the chest, in the head, to fill the empty spaces in her head and her heart. Aware that she is shredding the hospital gown with her nails because she is clutching at her traitorous heart, beating though dead and vacant. 

Then, she stills. 

“Alice!” Cries her head, a poor imitation of her angel’s voice. 

“Alice.” She says aloud. Consciously, she begins to rebuild her mind. Pick up the pieces. Dr. Cullen is in front of her, and she is sitting on the floor. She lists the people she knows; Herself, Alice, and Dr. Cullen, and Chief Swan. And her angel. “Alice.” She repeats again, sobbing freely. 

“Yes, Alice. Your name is Alice.” Dr. Cullen says from somewhere behind her veil of misery. He walks forward to her, gliding in smooth motions. He looks so much like her love; tall, blond, with that lovely white skin. But he looks like he has never seen ugliness, like her angel had. 

Her angel would understand, if he was here. He’d need none of the soothing nonsense words the doctor lulls her with, as he pries her arms from her chest and her jagged nails from the rips of her gown. She would not feel like this if she had her angel there to put her together. Dr. Cullen tries, he gathers her into his arms like a father would a child, on his knees on the floor. He whispers to her, things about new days and better things and struggles and how very brave she is. He lets her twine herself around him like ribbons, arms around his neck, and he hugs her with the cool touch that is so close to being right, just two degrees warmer than those scarred hands she loves. 

Alice sobs, dulled to her body, in the arms of the doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has reviewed and read so far! I really do appreciate it-- I know that Jasper/Alice isn't one of the crazy popular ships in this fandom, but I love them and want to share what I can! Special thanks to  
> generic_epiphany for writing the sweetest review and making me remember to publish this chapter!


	4. And Let me Go Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice makes and friend, and still feels lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I promise that Alice will get out of the hospital soon. I swear. She will. Next chapter is the last of slogging through the boring bits. God Alice, can't you get out of there any sooner??
> 
> Also, I have to make my excuses; I got accepted to college, which is way more complicated then you'd think it would be. Seriously. Why can't they just charge you one bill? Why so many little ones?? What are they for???
> 
> Suggested listening: Home (Michael Buble)  
> I'm adding these at the other chapters! They're songs from which I stole the title, and some that just feel like the chapters.

# Chapter Three

## And let me go home

 

Minutes bled into hours and then into weeks in the hospital. She is never alone here, no, but truly she did feel like there was something missing. Deep rooted in her chest, curling up in the unpleasant space between her ribs, between her lungs. She only feels whole in her visions. And she doesn’t tell Dr. Cullen about them anymore.

                                  

 

Alice is standing in front of the great empty glass wall, the back of her home. No-one else is home; she’d have heard them by now, rumbling in their deep voices that carried through the walls and windows, under the cracks in doorways. She loves that she is never alone. Her husband hums to her at night and her family is always moving, always singing and playing and dancing. The house is always light. At night, sometimes when the wind is howling and trees blow over like thunderclaps in the distance, she lights candles and pretends the power has gone out.

           

It’s only fun when she’s not alone.

 

Now the trees are looming and scary, and her own pulse is too loud in her ears. That empty space in the centre of her chest, so long filled, is leeching out into the rest of her. Leaking cold and tears and dark and sad. She is leaking sad.

 

It comes as no surprise that she does not hear the man enter. The door clicks softly closed, and she hears him toe off his boots, but she never hears him come to her. Wouldn’t even know he was there, if not for the filling of the emptiness inside of her.

           

“Sorry, miss.” He rolls the words in that thick southern accent of his, the one that she only hears when he’s content as a cat licking at bowl of cream.  “I got carried away hunting.”

           

She turns to him, forgetting the tears that are stuck on her lashes, and wraps her arms around his neck. Far too short, he lifts her like a feather so they are eye-to-eye. “But you’re home early?”

           

“But you missed me.” Those tears are now burning. She pinches her eyes closed. “Come on now,” he croons in her ear, kissing the tip. “open your eyes for me, Alice.”

           

His eyes are dark golden and his pupils blown wide. “Jazz,” she admonishes, flicking him on the nose. “you didn’t hunt enough!” 

           

He just laughs, the rumble moving into her where their chests are pressed together. “You missed me. How could I be gone?”

           

For him, it is as simple as that. What a marvellous thing, she can’t help but think, that she should find herself here, with this perfect man. How hard would the wind have to blow, for her to turn from where she’s jammed her face into the crook of his neck? How loud would the house need to be for her to come down from this glorious moment, for her to drain herself of the sheer joy that he makes her feel? His breath ghosts across her skin, smelling of magnolias and metal. Bliss.

 

 

 See, she told Dr. Cullen about how she learned her name. Granted, Alice was still loopy and half-asleep when she had that first vision, but her name came to her from the wonderful voice of her husband. Her love. Dr. Cullen gives her this look though, this infinitely sad look as if she could break the world in half by telling her about those moments. If the visions are telling her the future is good, his eyes are warning her that the future is more complicated than that.

           

That’s not the only odd (and vaguely un-doctor-like) thing she’s noticed about him. For one, she is constantly getting woken up from what she is sure is much-needed and medically advised rest by him, because he refuses to come to see her during the daylight hours. She does sleep too much, some fourteen-odd hours each day, but still. No-one should be woken from their beauty rest when they need it as much as her. Also, his hands are freezing and he doesn’t blink that often. Just infrequently enough for her to notice. He talks about his family oddly too, as if he is lost at sea and they are the anchor that found the bottom, keeping him in place with a thin little chain. He mentions his wife most often. Alice wonders what she looks like, for she must be an angel, from the way her beautiful doctor describes her. And though it’s not a problem to her, he seems to like her very much and is quite happy to indulge her. (It’s not very good for her recovery.)

           

Aside from the doctor, who comes every night without fail, and the army of annoying nurses, the only other person she meets with is Chief Swan. Who she is growing to like quite a bit. At first it was all ‘Alice, I’m here on official business for the Police Department of Forks’, but that was weeks ago and now he comes with sets of clean clothes, borrowed from his daughter, and coffee. Dr. Cullen doesn’t let her drink coffee, claims it makes her move around too much and makes her a hassle.

           

Today is one such day. The next time she sees the chief, she is running down the hall towards Dr. Cullen, waving two plastic bottles of orange juice.

           

“Chief Swan!” She cries, and goes running off towards him. Dr. Cullen called after her, but she ignored him in favour of running to the chief and hugging him. He instantly stiffened, inflexible like the crinkly plastic raincoat he sported. “Hi!” She released her arms from around his hunched shoulders and bounced back on her heels.

           

“Hello?” He sounded deeply confused. Dr. Cullen chose that moment to trot down the hall, smiling with his eyes but frowning with his mouth.

           

“Alice, I told you, we have to complete the physical evaluation.” He reprimanded.

           

She pouted, and Chief Swan spoke up. “She seems fine.”

           

“Exactly!” The hospital was starting to get to her. “Are you here to ask more questions? I can’t tell you anything because I still don’t remember, but Dr. Cullen gave me some fashion magazines from his daughter and you’ve just got to hear about all the dresses new this season!”

           

Chief Swan looks close to death. “Uh, no. Thanks.” He addresses the doctor. “I brought Bella here, for some company.”

           

Dr. Cullen flashes one of those disarming smiles, all teeth and charm. “Wonderful. I’m starting to believe she’s tiring of me.”

           

Alice feigns hurt. “Why, doctor, I could never get tired of you! The six hours you spend poking me and making me run down hallways every day is the best!”

           

He is not impressed. “I told you to walk down the hall.”

           

Alice winks at him.

           

“I’ll leave you too it, Chief. Please tell Bella I’m sorry to miss her.”

           

Just then, a soft voice pipes up from behind the chief. “Actually, I’m right here. Sorry.”

           

“Hello Bella,” Dr. Cullen says, the same kindness in his voice that Alice hears when her talks to her. “how are you?”

           

“I-I’m fine.” The girl answers, ducking behind her hair even as she steps out from behind Chief Swan.

 

It’s the girl from her vision. Out of the little yellow kitchen, but no less real.

           

“Any issues? Nausea, headache, confusion?” Alice is completely lost to the conversation, too busy working out how her hallucination is in the hospital with her.

           

“Nope. I’m doing great, really.” Bella whispers, and the relief rolling off Dr. Cullen is so potent she can feel it on her skin. What story is he hiding?

           

“I’m glad. Edward is still upset about what happened.” The doctor’s son? Alice leaned forward, squinting her eyes at Bella as if the other’s girls face can be read like a story book of this new and exciting information on her elusive doctor.

           

Bella flushes an alarming shade of red, stammering as she speaks. “Why? I mean, he saved me. My legs would be in six different pieces if he hadn’t been there, and my head? Smashed.” Chief Swan is pale.

           

Dr. Cullen looks uneasily between her and the chief. “A miracle. What an honour to have such a son.”

           

“He’s a good kid.” Chief Swan speak up, for the first time. Dr. Cullen nods, and then disappears down the hall in a swirl of his white coat. She watches him go, clean in his white coat and immaculately styled blond hair. It isn’t fair that he should be so handsome, and locked up in this hospital all night.

           

But Alice has other things to do than drool after her doctor. She needs to investigate this Bella character, and hopefully figure out why a vision is standing in front of her, nervously twiddling her thumbs!

           

Thankfully, the chief steps up. “Alice, this is my daughter, Bella.”

           

“Hi!” Alice calls cheerfully, walking over as quickly as her slightly atrophied legs and too-long sweat pants will allow her. “I’m Alice.”

           

“Bella. Swan. Nice to meet you?” The poor girl is clearly terrified of her, though Alice can only imagine why. Sure, her horrific first appearance likely sent the whole town into a compete panic, but even that doesn’t justify the nervousness on her face. Alice _can_ and _will_ make herself Bella’s friend.

           

“Nice to meet you too. Want to come look at magazines with me? Dr. Cullen brought me some, from his daughter, but he’s no fun to talk to about fashion. I don’t think he’s dressed himself in years, did you see his tie today?” The brown-haired girl looks horribly nervous, like her father the first time they met. But even Chief Swan warmed up to her after they talked long enough, and she hopes that Bella will too.

           

“With the snowflakes?” Bella asks, clearly not understanding the gravity of the tie.

           

“Duh, Mrs. Cullen must’ve picked it out for him!”

           

“You know a lot about Dr. Cullen.” Bella says, looking at her suspiciously.

           

Alice shoots her an unimpressed look from beneath her brow, and tugs her down the hall. “Literally, to the best of my knowledge, Dr. Cullen is the person I’ve spent the most time with in the whole world. Of course, I ask him about his life! Mine isn’t very exciting!”

           

Bella is incredulous. “You almost died in an 18-wheeler!”

           

Alice rolls her eyes and plops down on her unmade hospital bed. “No memory! Don’t know anything about that.”

           

Oh, sorry?” This Bella girl is cripplingly nervous, and quite awkward too.

           

She shrugs. “There’s nothing I can do about it. Why apologize? I don’t remember what happened before, so really, what do I have to miss?”

           

Thick tears are welling in Bella’s deep brown eyes. “That’s—that’s really sad.”

           

Alice shoots up from the bed, and rushes to sit next to her. “I shouldn’t have said that—Dr. Cullen says I’m supposed to be in shock and I’m not which is why I can talk so casually—I’m sorry.”

           

Bella sniffles, but stays stubbornly behind that mahogany curtain of hair. Alice reaches out for the end of it, her hand tremoring as it brushes the soft end. Her own is so brutally cut. The month in the hospital has seen it grow a startling inch, but she’s had no luck in convincing Dr. Cullen to let her trim it more evenly. Bella’s hair looks nothing like her own. For one, it’s long. But it’s also shiny and smooth, and smells faintly of strawberries when Alice drags her hand through the curtain, letting the red highlights catch in the lamp beside her bed as the hair falls back into place, shimmering and dancing like a thousand ballerinas.

           

“Your hair…” Alice whispers.

           

Bella reaches up and tucks it behind her ear, and looks at Alice. Instantly she repeals her hand, hiding it in her lap. “What?” Bella asks.

           

“Sorry, I’m just admiring your hair. It’s so pretty, in the light!”

           

Bella’s face wrinkles adorably. “It’s… just brown?”

           

Alice gives her the meanest glare she can muster. “Bella, it’s so much more than brown! There are red lowlights, and it’s really more of a very subdued auburn than just a brown.” She lifts the curtain in her hand, letting the strands slide over the edge of her palm like a waterfall. “See, there, in the light?”

           

“I guess I never looked.”

 

Alice giggles, then flits back to the bed and crosses her legs. “Now, down to business.”

           

“Business?” Bella asks uncertainly.

           

There is much to be discussed. “Naturally, business. You’re the first real girl I’ve met! All I do is spend time with cranky old nurses who hate me for taking up time with doctor dreamy” she rolls her eyes. Dr. Cullen’s disarming smile failed to shock her after the first few weeks. “I’ve literally only talked to them—and that doesn’t count, when you consider all they do is yell at me about ‘washing my hair right’ with the stinky hospital shampoo—Dr. Cullen, who is so-far my best friend and that’s a little bit sad, and your dad. So yes, lots of business.”

           

Her brown-haired companion shifts nervously in her seat. She is, Alice decides, a wiggler; rocking back and forth like a small child who can’t sit still. “I’m not really good with that stuff.”

           

Alice rolls her eyes for the infinite time today. “Bella, my best friend is Dr. Cullen. Please humour me?” Maybe it’s the pleading look in Alice’s big blue eyes that gets to the girl. Or it’s the terrible circumstances that surround her and the general misfortune of her life.

           

“Do you…” Bella scrunches her nose, deep in thought. “want to hear about the high school?”

           

Alice grins. “Absolutely.”

           

As Bella talks, Alice observes her. Sure, she does listen and interject at all the meaningful times and scowl at all the annoying people’s names, but mostly she is watching Bella. How her hands flutter in and around her hair, pulling at the ends when she describes a girl named Jessica who doesn’t seem very nice. The ends of Bella’s hair are jagged and split, even though she is tidy in all other aspects of dress. She talks about her mother with the infinite kindness and warmth that can only come from true familial love, and she talks about her father with the respect and cordiality of someone close but comfortable with giving a little space. She describes the halls of the odd collection of buildings that make up Fork High School (aren’t high schools normally one building? Alice can’t be sure.) and how it seems that she never gets a class without Eric or Mike, or worse, Tyler, peering at her from the back of the room. Alice must pull every word from her though, fight for every brief description and mention of a name.

           

Bella is just about to begin what she promises is the most drama found in Forks before Alice, when Dr. Cullen and Chief Swan appear in the doorway, blocking the white light from the hall fluorescents.

           

“Alice, Bella, how are you getting along?”

           

“Great!” Alice chirps. “You’re great Dr. Cullen, but all the gossip you have is about people who shoot themselves trying to shoot deer. Bella was just telling me about some crazy thing that happened last spring!”

           

Dr. Cullen smiles fondly. “Wonderful. Bella, is this the parking lot incident?”

           

Bella flushes near purple. “Yes.”

           

He chuckles. “A kid named Tyler,” Alice wrinkles her face in distaste. He was one of the kids that Bella rolled her eyes at whenever she mentioned, and she’s taken it upon herself to dislike him too. Chief Swan, humorously enough, gives her a little nod of approval for her dislike of Tyler. “lost control of his van on black ice in the parking lot. Bella was almost hit, but my son Edward” A quick glances reveals Bella’s flush is dangerously maroon coloured and deepening by the second. “pulled her out of the way. Thankfully, Bella’s truck is a very sturdy machine and saved them both.”

           

“Good truck, for teenagers.” Chief Swan adds.

           

“Indeed. Perhaps I should consider replacing one of Rosalie’s cars with something more… crash-proof.” Alice leans closer. Rosalie is the pretty daughter, the only girl in Dr. Cullen’s house save Esme.

           

“Maybe just have them drive the monster jeep?” Bella suggests.

           

Dr. Cullen’s eyes sparkle with mirth. “Has Emmett been driving that? I do believe it’s built just for off-roading.”   

           

Bella laughs, a small and quick burst, and turns to whisper to Alice. “Rosalie and Emmett like cars. Sometimes Rosalie drives this nice convertible, and Emmett drives the Jeep. Only, he makes Jasper, his brother, drive so he can talk to her by standing up and yelling out from the sun roof.” She grins. When Bella talks, her voice rings with a humour and a touch of quiet longing.

           

The doctor puts his heavenly patience on hold for a second, hanging up it up like a coat, and rolls his eyes. “Emmett.”

           

Chief Swan offers his consolation. “They’re all good kids, Carlisle. They stay out of trouble.” Then, after a moment of quiet thinking (the only type of thinking he does) he adds, “That is illegal, though.”

           

He gets a weary, but amused, look from the doctor.

           

“Speaking of kids,” he continues, looking at Bella. “we should get going. The game’s at six.” Bella looks a little put out, but stands and dusts off her jeans. In a perfectly executed motion, Dr. Cullen slides into the room and takes her place in the little bedside chair, while Bella comes to stand next to her father.

           

Chief Swan nods and gives her a “G’night.” before he walks off down the hall, but Bella lingers for a moment. “Can I come back, later?” She asks, as if there’s a chance that Alice would ever say no.

           

Alice shoots her the biggest smile, and says; “Of course, Bella! Bring the yearbook too, we can draw on Tyler’s face!” Bella just mirrors her smile in response, and then chases her father into the light beyond her door.

           

“Dr. Cullen,” Alice says very seriously. “can I call you Carlisle?”

           

“That’s not very professional, Alice.” She rolls her eyes. As if ‘professional’ matters—she has very little friends and Dr. Cullen is one of them.

           

“That’s not a ‘no’!” She trills, and Dr. Cullen sighs, but gives an affirmative little nod. “Well then, Carlisle, you’ve just been ousted as my best friend.”

           

He gives her a confused look, which softens almost immediately to fondness. “In all my years of being a doctor, I’ve never had a patient quite like you.”

           

She decides to miss his point. “Well I hope so, how many half-dead amnesiacs do you have around here?”

 

 

 

Dr. Cullen is standing so still she walks past him when Alice sees him next. In the hall, under the florescent lights, he looks just like the walls; pale and unmoving, holding infinite sadness in the way only a hospital can. Night has fallen and though the time often eludes her, she guesses the hour is past three in the morning and three days have passed since she met Bella.

 

Sleep is hard to come by too. Has she dozed in the last day or two, or is she hitting the 36-hour mark? All those days sleeping for 14 hours have caught up to her, and she gladly uses the spare energy to out-walk the threat of sleep.

           

She peers around her for a minute, observing that the psych ward she’s wandered into must be on supervised rest, and then taps him on the shoulder. “Carlisle? Is everything alright?”

           

He doesn’t startle, not quite, but Alice has the sense that she’s brought him back from some odd place that is neither awake nor asleep. “Alice,” he begins, voice dull, “aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

           

She shrugs. “I like walking. Did you know that I get out of breath if I walk up a single flight of stairs? That’s so sad! I have to be able to walk at least a little bit, right?” She doesn’t tell him that it doesn’t matter that she can’t even walk—she’ll never be able to catch her blond angel, and that’s what really matters in all of this. When she sees her future, surrounded by people who are so much stronger and better and so much _more_ than she is, it’s hard for things to seem like they matter. “Am I weak?” she asks, looking at his back from under her lashes.

           

Her fingers find the edge of her sweatshirt and she picks at the old hem.

           

He turns then to face her, and she’s glad that his beauty is not unfamiliar to her anymore. If it was, she’d turn and run, and right now she needs a friend. His eyes are dark, not just in the light, but dark in spirit; the heavy bags under his eyes and the dark circles worse than ever, his whole demeanour weighed down by some great trouble. Even his white coat is wrinkled, close to the collar.

           

“No, Alice.” He says, bending down to reach out to her. Her eyes pull tightly shut, and she turns away for a moment, a slight toss of her head, and his hand falls back to his side. “I think you’re very strong.”

           

“I’m serious.” Her insides are all twisted up. “Am I weak? What will the real world do to me?”

           

If he could, she’d think that he would fall asleep on the spot. Instead, he holds out his arm to her, bending again at the waist so her tiny arm can reach up and loop through his. “Can we continue this discussion in your room?”

           

“I might not sleep.” She warns him, but follows when he starts towards the elevator. Just before they reach the silver doors she stops, and tugs lightly on his arm. “Stairs?”

           

He eyes her legs, bare under the cotton short’s she’s sporting and covered in pink and red scarring. “If you’re tired or sore, I think that you should rest. Even emotional upset can influence your physical well-being, you know.” She pulls harder.

           

“Catch me if I fall, then.” She orders.

           

When he pushes open the big metal doors leading to the stairs, her heart falters just a little bit. She knows little about how her mind and her visions work, but she wonders if she’s missed a point in her life where she’s broken both her legs and cannot walk. Stairs seem so scary. The first step is shaky, and she must get both her feet down on the step before she can attempt the next one. It’s slow going; the only thing worse than her physical capabilities is her flexibility. Carlisle called it “muscle atrophy” and it means that her body withered, while she was sleeping for the first few long weeks in the hospital. The good doctor is there, as he always is, stepping one level below her and holding her arms firmly so she cannot fall, not with him there to carry her if she fails.

           

And though it takes them too long, he flashes her a brilliant smile and her heart warms.

           

“That was very good Alice,” he commends. “I’m impressed. Have you been walking often, during the day?”

           

An ugly snort rises from her. “I don’t have anything else to do.” He pushes open the doors to her floor, and the stairwell is left behind. “How long have you worked in the hospital? Is it always like this?” Her hand is still holding his, and she has to keep her arm bent so she can reach.

           

Carlisle ducks his head so she cannot she his face, and nods. “Sometimes the noise is great and sometimes, like now, it can be overwhelmingly silent. But it always feels the same to be here, late at night.”

           

“Are you lonely?” She asks, and presses her hand to her mouth, regretting the slip as soon as the words vacate her mouth. Sometimes Alice wonders if, because she cannot remember her childhood, she is doomed to repeat all the things that she should have figured out years ago—doomed to spend her life like a child in adult clothes, clinging to the hand of the doctor as he leads her back to the room. She needs so much guidance, so much leading.

           

“No.” Carlisle says, and she lifts her watery eyes from the floor.

           

“No?”

           

He shakes his head. “I was alone, for a very long time. My father and I… had an irrevocable falling out, many years ago. For a long time I was without family, until I met Esme.” A light comes into his face then, the kind that shines bright and warm from within his good heart. “She gifted me the chance to find in her a family of my own; not one that I was born into, but one that I created. One that I could be proud of.” He falls silent, though his mouth opens in speech once more.

           

Alice feels like dying.

           

“Family is who you make it, Alice. Not a birth, not a memory, not a religion or a belief. It is your choices that make your family.” But her eyes are closed and her ears are deaf.

           

For she is alone, and her choices are limited. If she knew her age, she would say that those years were pressing down on her shoulders; but she doesn’t, so she simply feels the oppressive cloud of not knowing surround her, smothering her from all sides. She is jealous, jealous of Carlisle and his family, of the chief and Bella, of the version of her that she sees in her visions, surrounded by love and the life Alice wishes she could have. Pain stabs in her heart when she reads about cloths and touches her own, dull and sad. It flares when he hair swings loose and choppy around her face; it makes her feel like an animal, all unkempt and matted fur. She has nothing. Her body, the only thing that she possesses, mangled and wretched as it is, is failing. She leans into the wall and wishes she could lie down.

           

“Alice, are you alright?” Carlisle asks, pressing a cold hand to her forehead.

           

“I’m fine.” She mutters. “Just tired. I walked a lot today.”

           

He pulls her arms then, tugging her gently down the hall until she is both far from the stairs and far from the wall. She sways, lost in the cloud.

           

“Would you mind, if I carry you?” He asks, already bending at the knees with one cold hand pressed around her shoulders. He didn’t need to ask, as her sleepy head is already falling in a nod, or maybe her neck is just giving out.

           

When the good doctor does lift her, it’s not how she expected. Like a small child she is pressed over his shoulder, one of his arms around her back and the other supporting the back of her legs in a seat. He smells like soap and cedar, and a touch of tea tree. Those are the words that come to mind, and she hopes that her limited recollection is identifying them correctly. There are overtones of fabric softener and a hint of floral perfume—Esme, marked on his heart and his clothes. His clothes are just as cold as he is, but the rocking from his strong stride is calling her back to her warm little bed. Like magic, when she pulls the grey thing to mind, she feels the warmth of its blankets even pressing against her. A mirage.

           

Carlisle feels like a cold home, like coming home after a long vacation or work to an empty house. Like a commercial for a wood burning stove; a family coming home in the wintery snow, the father opening the door first to the house only to find the heat off. He’d pull of his hat and gloves and set right to work on heating up the core of the house—right behind him is lovely Esme, who lights candles and sets out blankets. Children pour in after them, dropping things and making the house look… lived in. He feels like the moment right when the door is first opened, looking at a place that you used to live in, finding it cold and empty; he is ready to fill the cold house with warmth and with love and with family.

           

When she notices the tears dripping down her nose, Carlisle is manoeuvring the door to her room open, pushing the knob with the arm that supports her and twisting to nudge the door open with his shoulder as not to disturb her. The room is warmer than the rest of the hospital, thanks to Carlisle’s request for a heater when she began sleeping in three sweatshirts and chattering her teeth half-off. In the corner, next to a table piled with magazines and a chair covered drawings and pencils, the little metal box hums merrily and glows soft red into the room. In the dim light, she can see nothing, though she knows the postage-stamp room plenty well in the daylight hours.

           

He sets her gently on the bed, and when he pries her fingers from the collar of his shirt, she realizes the shaking tension in her hands from clutching him for too long.

           

“Sorry,” she murmurs. “I wrinkled your shirt.”

           

Carlisle sighs, and brushes the creases carefully. “Esme likes to press them perfectly, but she admonishes me if they return that way. I’m ‘supposed to interact with the patients’ she tells me, and her proof is in the wear of my clothing.” Pulling back the grey blanket and pressing her down at the same time, Alice slides in obediently to the nest of warmth. “She’ll be delighted today.”

           

“Anytime.” Alice whispers, her eyes closed.

           

She hears him stand, the rustle of his clothes the only cue. His footsteps tap once, twice, three times, and then stop. One deep breath reaches the bottom of her lungs before his shoes tap out once more. It takes him five strides to completely leave the room from her bedside, but he’s stopped again. Her eyelids flare marron, unable to close out all the hospital light.  

           

“Alice, you always have someone to turn to, even if it’s only me.” He promises.           

           

His shoes tap out the fifth, and final, step out of her room and her eyelids return to black.

           

As she falls asleep the words echo in her head; “someone to turn to.” Is he her family now? She loves him like a father might make her feel. In all the stories she’s read its always the father who takes care of his family, watching them grow up with a careful eye for any danger. It’s the father that, when the girls in the editorial section of her Teen Vogue magazines get into trouble, swoops in to save the day. What would it be like to have someone to call on when she needs help? When she is tired and lonely and afraid—what would it be like?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know how this chapter is! I really... don't like writing Charlie. I love the character, but he's so hard to write! Let me know what you think!
> 
> Since I just added the songs to the other chapters, would anybody be interested in the whole playlist?


	5. Is That Bridge Getting Built?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice finds a new home with the Swan's and gets (a well-deserved) bit of good news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhhh look who's finally out of the hospital!!!
> 
> (And look who finally updated...)
> 
>  
> 
> Song: Lost in my Mind by The Head and the Heart

# Chapter Four

Alice is considering scratching lines into the walls of the hospital, like prisoners in the terrible pirate movies she keeps watching on day-time hospital TV. Carlisle declared her fine a while ago, but she remains in the hospital. Though he’s too kind to say so, she suspects that she doesn’t have a place to go. She’d be depressed about, you know, having no-one and no-one wanting her, but mostly she’s overwhelmed with how _goddamn boring it is_.

           

Picking the paint of the walls is starting to look mighty appealing.  

           

The only thing she has to think about is the last vision she had. And what a lovely thing to think about. (Not really.) 

 

 

Alice and the man she loves so much are sitting, cross-legged on the forest floor and staring at each other.

 

She could kill him.

 

“Leaving?” She demands, seeing red at the edges of her vision. She hopes he can feel it rolling off her in waves like the ocean crashing on the beach, breaking bodies in the undertow and hidden rocks.

           

He winces. Oh, he always feels what she feels. How much does it hurt, she wonders, to experience the pure rage that someone can possess? How much does it hurt _him_ , knowing that she hates him more than anything in the world, now? More than her shitty excuse for a half-life, more than her missing memories, more than anything that has ever plagued her. And how she has been followed by misfortune.

           

“You can’t leave.” She tells him. All she has is him. “I-I don’t even have a name without you. How?”

           

“How?” He replies, jumping to his feet with that effortless, inhuman, speed. “How can I stay?” His accent thickens, loose whiskey now thick honey.

           

There could be tears streaming down her face, or her eyes could be dry as his. It doesn’t matter anymore.

           

“I’ll die, if you leave. You’d kill me.”

           

He turns from her and begins to tremor. Shaking like a child scarred of a thunderstorm.

           

She rains hellfire on his breaking back, spitting words falling like meteorites. “You’ll kill me. You know—I have nothing keeping me here! Not a single thing in the whole wretched world that is keeping me tethered. I can see what you’re going to do, I can see everything. I never thought that-” she chokes on the words. “-I never thought that you would choose this. Over all the other options, all the other ways.”

           

“Alice, it ends like this, or you end like me.”

           

“What’s so wrong with that! You don’t want me, chasing you forever? You’d rather me die, wither and die, without you? I’ll just,” something hysteric, something like a laugh, chokes her “float away!” she flaps her hands in an airy little gesture.

           

But he says nothing. Still he shakes, cowers, hides from her and her mean words. God, if she could form a thought beyond all the rage and inconceivable pain, she’d look to the future and see what to say to make him stay. It doesn’t, and how it hurts her to say this, it doesn’t seem like anything she can hurt him with will hurt him enough to stay. So Alice sits on the forest floor, fists in her dress, crying like a baby.

           

Then, she is still. “I’ll kill you.” No, no, there is more to all of this. “It will kill you. What is this? The world’s longest suicide note? I’m not your piece of paper to write on, Jasper. I won’t let you do this to yourself—nobody will! Nobody is letting you leave, not by choice. I’m not going to die melancholy in my old age alone just because you’ll live forever.”

           

He turns his hard eyes to her. Blood still lingers in a smudge under one, the same colour as his irises. “Alice,” He says very slowly, making his way over to her with silent steps. It’s the one of a few times she’s seen him walk like she does, slow and inefficient. “Alice, this is beyond me.”

           

“You don’t mean that.” He sits down next to her, scrubbed-clean hands dirtied by the forest. She lungs for him, pulling herself desperately into his chest and clenching his iron skin for all her might. “You don’t mean that.”

           

For a moment, though she still cannot summon the clarity to look ahead, she can see him throwing her off. Casting her into the forest with a backhand from just a quick, efficient move. She’d be gone in moments too, gone with her back broken across a tree. Or worse, he could pull himself gently from her grip. Pull her skinny little arms from around his neck, place them gently on her chest, and kiss her forehead. He could rise and look at her with broken, near-black eyes, and walk away. She could never see him again. Or he could sit there with her for the next hours, days, weeks, and then disappear forever. Maybe he’ll drag his family with him, more likely he’d go alone and they’d never know what happened. Gone, without even a face on a milk carton to follow.

           

“This is love, Jasper.” She whispers, one last desperate attempt to keep him there. “I know you feel it. Isn’t it horrible?”

           

“It is.” He agrees.

           

And he stays.

 

 

Alice is still shaken by that. She wakes up with screaming nightmares twice. All she’d been doing was sitting on the floor of her room, sketching a dress on some paper nicked from Dr. Cullen’s thick clipboard. It was her CAT scan paperwork. Had that been so wrong, that she’d need a punishment like that vision? She tried to hate it, she truly did. God, how it had opened a pit inside of her and made the aching emptiness, usually gone in minutes after the visions, her constant monster. The skeleton in her closet, only she was the closet and the bones tumbled together when she closed her eyes.

 

It taught her things, though. It gave her a name—Jasper, the sound of heaven on earth—and the sinking suspicion she wasn’t just having bad dreams anymore.  

           

That was the worst part about her latest vision. A cold wind curling in her gut whispered that she’d see that scene play out soon than later. That was what kept her up and night and woke her screaming. What kept her in her room this morning, and what keeps her there now, picking at the paint next to her headboard.

           

A knock sounds at the door to save the paint job on the walls. Alice lets a smile overtake her face, and gleefully flips up out of bed. A distraction, at long last.

           

“Hi!” She cries.

           

“Erm, hi, Alice.” Awkward Bella says.

           

“How are you? I’m so happy you’re here—look, I’ve been peeling paint off the walls— how have you been?” She blurts out all at once, eagerly looking at her guest. Bella, despite looking closer and closer to running with every word Alice spouts, is pulling off her jacket.

           

Bella blinks her big brown eyes in confusion. “Huh?”

           

“Sorry, Dr. Cullen says I talk to fast. Apparently, I have ‘too much energy for the hospital’ or something. I don’t get it. I literally don’t have any recollection of being outside of the hospital, how can I be less than suited for it?” Alice says, as Bella tosses the ugly brown coat and reveals the most horrendous green sweater beneath it. Her nose wrinkles in distaste. The sweater must have crawled into a sewer in 1992 and resurfaced today, to no-one’s benefit. She must destroy it.

           

“Well, actually, that’s why I’m here. Charlie sent me.”

           

She nods, and motions for Bella to continue. Perhaps she should get out of the bed, or move from her perch and relax a little. She doesn’t.

           

“You don’t have anywhere to go, right?”

           

“Ouch, Bella. Thanks for the reminder?” It’s true, but stings to hear from the mouth of Bella Swan, especially when she’s seen herself sitting in the kitchen with the Swan’s enjoying many a dinner together in her s

           

Wait.

           

If she’s seen herself, sitting in the kitchen, eating dinner with Bella and Chief Swan, that means she must stay here, right? More importantly, she’s caught glimpses of a too-small purple bedroom with two dressers, almost touching, crammed in together. She’d been up to her elbows in one and casting suspicious glances over her shoulder. The very sweater that Bella is currently the victim off was in Alice’s hands. She was on her way to toss it, for that matter.

           

Alice smiles. “You’re right, though. What did you want to say?”

           

Bella’s face shifts, from mild confusion to slight worry. She settles on concern. “We have room at our house. Charlie offered.” Alice begins to shake in her seat, pulling her legs under her so she is boosted to eye level with the taller hospital chair.

           

“Offered, for me to stay?” She clarifies.

           

“I mean, the PD want you to stay close. It’s really safer anyways. Dr. Cullen says he can write up the paperwork and have you out of here by tomorrow morning. I think you’ve been here for too long.” Bella flushes her standard brilliant crimson. “Not that we don’t, um, want you to stay. The police thing is part of it, but, well, Charlie really likes you.”

           

Alice is touched. “He does?”

           

Bella nods seriously. “A lot. You remind him of my mother, I think.” There’s a story there, but Alice decides for the first time that she can remember to _not_ pry.

           

Instead she says: “That’s so sweet! We’ll be just like sisters, you know. Dr. Cullen says I have all of my cognitive functions intact, so it’ll be no trouble for you and Chief Swan, I promise.” Then she does rise from her hospital bed. It’s felt cold since Bella’s news, like she’s been sitting in someone else’s bed, and they’ve told her to leave. An extremely accurate metaphor. “I’ve always wanted a sister!”

           

Bella looks worried, for sure, with the crease in her brow. But there is a levity to her posture, as if some great weight has been lifted from her. “It can be really quiet around the house.”

           

Alice pulls Bella into a hug then, hopping from the bed and right into her arms. “Just you wait!” She exclaims, throwing her arms around the girl’s warm neck and hideously itchy sweater. “It’ll be perfect.”

 

 

True to Bella’s word, Alice has all of her belongings (none, save for a concerning number of magazines) in a biohazard bag and is looking into her room with a distinct mix of sadness and goddamn relief to be out of the hospital. It’s been two months. She’s never been so ready to leave a place, in all of her two months of reference. Well, that one MRI that took six hours is a good contender for worst moments, but it the machine doesn’t inspire the resentment that the room does.

           

“May we never meet again.” She wishes the room as a goodbye, and then turns on her heel. “Good riddance.”

           

“Bella? Alice?” Chief Swan calls from down the hall. A smile spreads across her face. Sure, she doesn’t know all that much about Chief Swan, but she likes him a lot, and that is good enough for her. Plus, her helpful visions tell her that they get along well enough in the house together, and that he is never unkind to her. Like Bella, he despises conflict.

           

“Coming!” She calls, and hurries off down the hall. She’s barefoot, naturally, but her feet don’t make any noise on the hospital tile. Her steps are too light and bouncy for that. “I had to wish the room goodbye,” She explains to the waiting group. “I think Bella is in the bathroom.”

           

Dr. Cullen, in all his grinning, movie-star beauty came to bid her farewell. They’ve become good friends, the two of them. “Perfect timing, then. Alice, if I may?” He gestures to a small office tucked into the hallway, and she gives Chief Swan a smile before she follows the gesture. Dr. Cullen closes the door behind him, and looks her dead in the eyes. Serious, as she had never seen him before.

           

His eyes are black.

           

“Alice,” he begins, watching her like a hawk. She sits absolutely still and wills herself not to betray any nerves. “I understand that your visions have not stopped, have they?”

           

“No.” She shakes her head. “I just stopped telling you about them.”

           

“Why?” His face is open and curious, against the firm and professional stance he has taken. In the closet-sized office there is little place for either of them to go, with his height. In the white lab coat and white painted room, Dr. Cullen looks cut from the walls. If not for his eyes, and the snowman adorned tie he sports, he could be invisible. Even his chest doesn’t seem to move with breath, as if he is plaster and inorganic.

           

Alice shrugs. “You looked sad, when I mentioned it. And, well…” She trails off, twiddling her thumbs. The doctor’s piercing gaze prompts her to continue. “And I see things that haven’t happened yet.”

           

He does not judge her, he does not do anything at all but look at her with those suddenly dark eyes, staring right into her soul. It’s good that she never thinks to lie, or she’s be sweating under the intense scrutiny now. She can’t help but wonder what he must think of her. After spending all those hours, all that government money, on testing her and determining the damages, he cannot solve the problem of her visions. She’s been told that he did all her stiches himself, and even corrected the lumpy edges of her haircut at the back, where she couldn’t reach. He’s dried her tears and done his best to put her back together. It isn’t fair, that all his efforts should be for naught.

           

“Alice, listen to me very carefully.” He’s going to tell her that she’s actually just completely crazy and this is all an elaborate ruse to trick her into going to the psych ward. “Pay attention to your visions.”

           

“What?” She asks incredulously.

           

“I’m a doctor, yes. And there are things that no science can explain. If they have yet to fail you, I suggest that you listen to your visions. It could be that the head trauma is presenting itself abnormally, of course, and this is simply your healing contusions and the long hours in the hospital getting to you.” He steps closer to her, enough that she can smell clean linen and warmth of his cologne. If only she could bottle that and take it with her. “Yet, if you feel they are more than that, listen.”

           

She nods, a little dumbstruck.

           

“Wonderful. Now, don’t mention this to anyone else. It’s hardly professional.” He winks at her, and her heart briefly stops. It restarts though, and she grins mischievously.

           

“I won’t. And I will listen to the visions.” It’s her turn to lean in close and whisper to him. “I’ve seen Bella and I, cooking dinner and folding clothes and such. Smiling a lot. This will be good.”

           

“I hope so, Alice. I hope so.” Then he opens the door to the office and they step out.

           

Bella’s returned in the time their conversation took, and she converses quietly with her father. They both look up when Alice steps out and Carlisle follows like a shadow. Both smile. The doctor is a mystery to her, with his untouchable beauty and kindness and his belief in her. But she is glad to have an ally in this, a person to cling to in the sea of new memories she must make all the time.

           

“Hi Bella! Sorry about that, Dr. Cullen didn’t want you all to see him cry. He’ll miss me, won’t you?” She looks over her shoulder with a cheeky smile. The doctor, for all his patience, rolls his eyes.

           

“Of course Alice. You were a once-in-a-lifetime patient.” He chuckles at some private joke. “Charlie, Bella, I wish you the best of luck. Please let me know if anything unusual happens, and Charlie, keep me updated on the case.” He gives a final nod. “Don’t be a stranger, Esme would love to see you all.” Then, like a lovely dream, he turns a disappears down the hall. Alice can’t help but sigh.

           

“I think he’s my best friend. I’ll miss him.” She sniffles. Bella reaches out to pat her on the shoulder, but thinks the better of it and hesitantly withdraws her hand.

           

“It’s a small town, you’ll run into him.” She reassures.

           

Chief Swan says, gruffly, exactly the thing to break the tension and sadness thick in the air. “Bella finds her way here once a month. You can drive her.”

           

They all walk down the hall, Alice giggling in harmony with Charlie’s rumbling chuckle, as Bella blushes like a traffic light and hides behind her hair.

 

 

The Swan household is small, overwhelmingly yellow, and utterly perfect. Alice has never seen anything better than the worn and chipped paint on the steps or the moss threatening the concrete base of the old wooden structure. Inside is even better—the dark panelled kitchen with the bright yellow cabinets from her vision (a wonderful confirmation in a time of great stress) and the pictures of Bella throughout all her years of school. Bella kicks her shoes off at the door and trudges immediately upstairs, into the leftmost of three doors in a tiny hall.

           

She wonders if Jasper would like it here. If it could be pictures of the two of them lining the mantle, their love painting the cabinets yellow and splashing the walls with paint as they laugh. No, he seems to serious for those things. Maybe she’d splash him with paint, to see if he’d hit her back.

 

 

Alice lounges on the chair, idly flipping through the pages of a Jane Austen and running her manicured fingers over a set of drill bits, lined up by size. “Are you going to use these?” She asks Jasper, flicking her eyes from the page.

           

Jasper, scars on his chest visible through the linen of his loose shirt. It could be from 1900—it probably is—and the look is such that Alice must only take him in in glances and peeks, or she’ll faint. He frowns, a silvery scar on his brow disappearing into the furrow. “Should I?”

           

She shrugs. “It seems a little easier, than the hand-crank-thing.” She waves at the edge of the plank, where an odd bent metal thing is latching to the side of large cherry slab. It gives her medieval torture device vibes, compared to the power drill resting idle beside her.   

           

Jasper freezes in that uncanny way of his, then rushes to her side, faster than she can blink he is across the room with nothing but the disruption of the air to show he’d ever been there. He kneels beside her, so tall that they are merely equalled by her sitting and his position on the floor. He picks up a silvery piece and twirls it in his palm, glittering like his skin in the sun. “I had none of this growin’ up,” he drawls, looking at her from the side of his eye with a hint of mischief. “and we got by fine.”

 

           

Bella’s bedroom is painted light purple, and inside is a single large bed. The room is not filled; there are empty spaces in the bookshelves and a new, clean, desk shoved into the corner. A large wardrobe has clothes peeking out the bottom of only one side. Underneath the other desk is the shadowy other half of the bookshelves’ content—stacks and stacks of paperbacks. Charlie had brought her one, but Alice preferred her magazines.

           

She lets her little bag go with a ‘thump’ on the carpet.

           

“I love it!” She cries, and throws her arms around Bella.

           

“Really?” Her new roommate asks in shock.

           

Alice bounces back, shaking her head. “It’s perfect! I love purple.”      

           

Bella doesn’t quite get it. “I guess it’s better than the hospital,” Alice nods adamantly. If the walls had been white, who knows what crazy things she would’ve done. She’s seen enough bland white walls to last a lifetime. “but it’s small. Sorry.”

           

“What do you have to be sorry for?”

           

“Well…” Bella trails off, scuffing her feet against the floor. She’s a fair few inches taller than Alice, and her feet look bigger too. Alice is small in the extreme—Dr. Cullen was being generous when he declared her just barely five feet tall at the hospital. “I know it’s not much.”

           

Alice shrugs. She can’t tell Bella that they’ll both grow to love this house and live like sisters. She can’t tell her about the shining golden hue of her visions of them in the kitchen, or the bright blue that they paint the living room. All she can offer is this; “For someone who’s whole life has been in a hospital, this means everything.”

           

Bella’s cream and coffee eyes well with tears, thankfully Charlie interrupts before Alice can make her new hosts cry on her first day here.

           

“Alice, Bella?” He booms up from downstairs. Alice looks over at Bella, whose eyebrows are furrowed in confusion.

           

“He’s never done that before.” She whispers.  

           

“Are we in trouble?” Alice asks before she can think better of it.

           

Bella looks at her and shrugs, but they both trudge down the wooden stairs. Bella almost loses her balance, socks slippery on the worn surface. Alice is still barefoot—she walks so softly neither of the Swans have noticed—and never missteps. Maybe she can teach Bella awareness of her own limbs?

           

“Hello Chief Swan.” Alice says respectfully when they round the corner from the stairs, turning from the stamp-sized living room to face the kitchen.

           

“Hello.” His posture is stiff as a board. Alice shuffles her feet nervously, and Bella bites her bottom lip. “This came, for you.” He holds out a legal-sized envelope to Alice. She takes it, hesitantly.

           

She doesn’t immediately grasp what she holds. As a matter of fact, she shuffles through the sheets of paper for several moments before she notices the small note stuck to the front page. They all look the same, covered in tiny typing with large black spots, blacked out words, every few lines. There are lots of blanks for signatures.

           

_‘Alice; these are your papers. Please enjoy the government check for your welfare. Consider it the sole benefit to this situation, if you will. Esme sent some clothes along as well, she hopes you like them. Carlisle.’_

She grins, ear to ear. “I think these are my papers. Making me a legal person, and all that.” She pulls one that has less text than the others, and finds it to contain a list of all her physical traits. Next to her age is ‘16’ with a question mark. “Dr. Cullen thinks I’m sixteen. The same as you, Bella?” She glances at the girl, who had moved to peer over her shoulder. Bella reddens and steps back when she’s caught. Alice goes back to flipping through the sheets. Something catches her eye, and she can’t help but point it out to Chief Swan. “Look, Carlisle put my name down as Alice Jane Doe!”

           

The chief gives a half-hearted smile. Her hospital born macabre humour appears too much for him. “Can I?” He waves to the papers. She hands them over, and he performs the same scan she did, only to much more success. “You’re enrolled at Forks High.” He says with surprise. “When did he find the time?” he mutters under his breath, reading quicker now.

           

“I was in there a while,” She answers the rhetorical question. “he did decide there wasn’t much chance of me remembering anything.”

           

He grunts. “Says so here.” Chief Swan looks at her, and for once she is stilled by the calm seriousness in his eyes. “These are Dr. Cullen’s findings, legalizing you living here. At least during the investigation.” He looks worried, and leans over the counter, propping himself on his elbow as he reads, now flipping back to the first page. When he does so, a small piece of paper flutters out onto the floor.

           

His jaw flexes, surprised, when he picks it up.

           

“What is it?” Bella asks.

           

Charlie hands her the check, and then looks at Alice carefully. “It looks like you’ve got a job, Bells. Get Alice some new things. Have fun.” He walks past the two of them, Bella staring mutely at the small slip.

           

In her hands is a check for two thousand dollars.

           

Alice grins. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my defense for the tardiness, I'm graduating on Friday and school has been kicking my sorry ass.


	6. Stranger Than Your Sympathy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice bonds with her new family and meets Jake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This... is mostly fluff. Aside from introducing Jake, it introduces the most important character in this fic; The Bastard Sewing Machine That Hates Everyone. 
> 
> Song for this chapter: Sympathy by the Goo Goo Dolls

# Chapter Five

## Stranger than your sympathy

Shopping for Alice takes four hours that evening, and six more the next day. She returns to the Swan household with so many bags that they had to cover them in the back of the truck, the rusty cab of Bella’s ancient truck wheezing and stuffed to the brim after the first hour. Surprisingly (to Bella at least) Alice is a clever shopper; she buys good leather shoes (three pairs) and then invests in a couple of decent heels from a thrift store. She buys fabric and lace and ribbon—there’s a sewing machine in the attic, so Bella tells her—and then soft yards of silk. A good leather shoulder bag from a vintage store, and a few cute fascinators and hats, for covering her atrocious, boyish, chop of a haircut. Bella offers to lend her any jewellery she could want, but she finds a tiny silver bracelet with a pattern like etched rope and haggles the price down to half. The man behind the counter gives her a pair of silver stud earrings, shaped like hearts, when she shoots him her best smile. Her favourite find is a stack of linen vintage tablecloths—Bella gives her a very concerned look for that purchase—which will make the cutest skirts.

 

When she picks up one with blue embroidery, her mind cuts to black.

 

 

Alice is lying in an infinite field of blue flowers. She’s not lying, no; there are two strong arms, carrying her, lifting her up. Twilight has fallen over the field, and the full skirt of her white dress drags through the blossoms as she is carried away.

           

 

So, Alice buys blue thread the colour of the state flower of Texas (she googles ‘bright blue flowers field’ and after much swearing at the computer, finds the flowers and then the colour the next day at the sewing shop) and plans for a dress with a collar of bluebonnets.

 

When they return from the second day of shopping, she coaxes Bella into helping her carry the heavy machine down from the attic before she retreats behind her book, hiding from the threat of more shopping. The sewing machine is ancient. Older than the truck. It probably was here before the house, and possesses enough quirks to make even Alice kick it more than once. She steals a can of oil out from under the sink and sets to work, having commandeered a corner of the little living room, on bringing the thing back to life by sheer force of will.

 

“Are you going to get that working?” Bella asks, looking up from her book at the couch. She’s read the same book, ‘Wuthering Heights’, cover-to-cover three times in the days they’ve spent together, but Bella refuses to leave her alone. Maybe it’s nerves, maybe it’s the hope that she and Alice will become friends just by being physically close, maybe it’s that Bella likes being around people more than she lets on. Maybe she’s lonely. Alice is.

 

“Oh you of little faith,” Alice says, wrenching the wheel around again and again. “I get the feeling this is not my first time with a sewing machine.” Bella closes her book and stands up from the couch.

 

“Can I help?”

 

Alice wipes her brow, leaving a streak of grease heavy on her delicate skin. “I really don’t know.” She rocks back on her heels, shining the flashlight she grips into the underside of the bastard machine. “I think it hates me.”

 

Bella nods in solidarity, crouching down beside her. They don’t touch, but they near contact is close enough to sooth her frustrations. “I can call Jacob, if you want.”

 

 

A tall boy, firmly muscled but with a boyish edge to his face. He smells like sunshine and is warm to the touch. Bella beckons him into the kitchen with a carefree smile, the smell of tomato sauce and Italian sausage spreading all throughout the house. Alice looks up from the whirring of her machine and the silk it pulls together, to grin. “Just a minute!” She calls.

 

 

“Jacob?”

 

Her face lights up. “Let me get the phone. He fixed the truck for me. That,” she points at the offending thing. “can’t be that hard, right? Compared to the truck?”

 

Alice grins brightly, flicking off the light. “Great idea! I’ll go clean up while you call.”

 

She’s hopes this vision comes to pass soon. Sure, she bought clothes; but they all need small touches, little things like redone collars and new hems. The idea of wearing clothes made just for her makes her skin tingle, like some mild current runs through it. Things that she alone owns, things that she’s created or changed. Now, at long last, that evil machine will be defeated!

 

Washing her face and hands in the lone upstairs bathroom takes no time at all, and she’s bounding down the stairs just as a quick knock sounds.

 

Jacob doesn’t wait for Bella to answer, instead he pulls his tall frame through the door with the awkward movements of someone taller than they quite understand. Alice giggles a little, but he doesn’t even look at the stairs as he seeks Bella immediately, walking right into the living room.  As soon as he passes she ducks into the kitchen, peering out to watch Bella and her guest talk.

 

Jacob is a large person, tall and broad shouldered and all together strong looking. His skin is coppery hued, as if infused with the afternoon sun on a hot summer day. Dressed in only a white tee shirt and jeans, with no jacket in sight, Alice shivers on his behalf. She can’t help but be jealous of his hair, long and inky, falling to the middle of his defined back. Carlisle had mentioned something about a local Native American community, but his face had been pinched and she hadn’t pushed the subject. If all of them looked like the Hercules in the living room, she’d have pushed more.

 

If not for her mystery man, she’d be blushing like Bella right now.

 

He reaches out, and Bella, immersed in staring at the sewing machine like it’ll fix itself if she wills it to, never sees his hug coming. “Jake!” She cries, delighted as she hugs him back, tightly. “Please tell me you can fix this?” She begs, looking pitifully between him and the bastard machine.

 

He laughs, voice booming rather deeply. “Wow, Bells. Nice to see you too.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “Shut up. It’s not my fault you don’t have a phone in the garage. I figured you could fix things here for once, and I’d actually get to see you.”

 

“I’ve been busy!” He defends. “Did you see my sweet ride?” Alice hadn’t noticed, but there’s a large black motorcycle pulled up onto the front porch. The back looks suspiciously like it’s missing a few pieces.

 

“Charlie will kill you if he sees that.” Bella warns, but Jake just nudges her with his big shoulder and bends to examine the sewing machine.

 

“C’mon, I’ll hide it around back. How long is this thing going to take, anyway? What’s wrong with it?” Bella shrugs, hopeless and unhelpful. “Great.” Jake mutters. “Thanks Bells.”

 

Bella just laughs and retreats to the kitchen, nearly bumping into Alice, still peeking around the corner. Alice rounds on her with a grin like the devil; “You didn’t tell me you were dating anyone!” She hisses in a whisper, tugging her deep into the kitchen so they can gossip in peace.

 

“I’m not?” Bella wrinkles her eyebrows.

 

“No,” Alice mockingly shakes he head. “you’re definitely not dating the hunk with the motocycle. I totally believe you!”

 

“Jake?” Bella cocks her head to the side. “He’s my best friend.”

“No, I’m talking about the other ridiculously hot guy who’s obviously head over heels for you and standing in your living room!” She shakes Bella’s shoulders a little, surprised by the strength in her small arms.

 

“Jake’s my best friend.” Alice shakes her head sadly.

           

“Bella, are you blind?”

           

“No?”

           

She groans and puts her head in her hands. “Yes, you are. That boy is so in love with you!”

           

Bella pales rapidly, and looks nervously around at the kitchen. Seeking an escape from the conversation, no doubt. “That’s… crazy. Whatever. I should make dinner. Lasagne!” And with that exclamation, she firmly turns her back on Alice to root through the fridge.

           

Alice sighs, knows a lost cause when she sees one. How could Bella miss the way he walked immediately to her, didn’t (and has yet to) notice the odd houseguest in the kitchen or when she was standing right in front of him on the stairs. Bella, moving about the kitchen with single-minded determination to craft a perfect lasagne, has already put the matter out of mind. Alice sighs again in disappointment, but rises to offer her help nonetheless. She can at least be useful, if the chief is going to host her.

           

Jacob is covered in the pilfered oil from under the kitchen sink within minutes, and by the time Charlie walks in the door in his full police uniform, tired and hungry, Jacob has been upstairs showering whilst his clothes spin through a quick cycle in the wash for twenty minutes. He emerges from the bathroom, towel draped around his shoulders and a pair of too-short sweatpants reclaimed from Bella around his hips, shaking his hair like a dog, with a bright smile. He’s like the sun.    

           

“Chief!” He calls, trudging down the stairs. Charlie gives him a once over as he pulls his work shoes off and hangs the gun belt on the peg beside the coat rack. He carefully pulls the bullets from the barrel of the gun, and tucks them into his pocket.

           

“Jake.” He greets warmly. “I didn’t know you were coming. Is your dad here?” That’s one of the longest sentences Alice has ever heard him utter.

           

“Nope, just me. Bella called me over to fix that thing,” again with the accusatory pointing at the sewing machine. Alice has dubbed it ‘the Bastard’. “a few hours ago. Is there a game?”

           

Charlie chuckles. “That’s what I was wondering.”

           

The boys exchange some sort of comparison of sport teams—Jacob for the team clearly loosing, and Charlie trying to no avail to lure him to the other side. The conversation is totally lost on her—not because she has no memory of sports or how they work (though she doesn’t) but because she could not care less about them. They break from their man-talk when the ding of the oven timer sounds, and they both become suddenly aware of the alluring smell of cheese and meat from the kitchen.

           

“Dinner?” Charlie asks.

           

“Lasagne. Enough even for Jake.” Bella says with a playful glare, which Jacob has the good sense to look bashful under.

           

“He eats enough for a family.” Charlie explains, giving Alice a small smile. “How are you?”

           

“Great!” Alice chirps. “I can’t wait to start sewing! I don’t exactly remember sewing, but Carlisle said I should have muscle memories, and it sure feels familiar.”

           

“What?” They all look at Jacob, who is staring at Alice in alarm. “Who are you?” She’s been waiting for this moment for hours—the look on his face is such that she wishes she had a camera. He looks genuinely frightened of her little self, a good foot, maybe two, below him.

           

“Alice.” She responds flatly, shooting him an unimpressed look. “And just because you’re too tall and look over my head doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have seen me hours ago. I’ve been here the whole time.” She puts her hands on her hips and taps her foot.

           

Bella bursts into laughter, and even Charlie lets out a hearty chuckle. It falls to Bella to make the introduction. “Jake, this is Alice. She’s staying with us. Alice, the jerk is my best friend Jake. Ignore him—he eats so much he replaced his brain with a second stomach.”

           

Alice sticks her thin hand out to him. “Alice Jane Doe.” He accepts and shakes, hand unnaturally warm and completely enveloping her own. “I’m the dying girl from the truck a few months ago, if you keep up with the news.” Bella presses a hand to her mouth trying to hold back a laugh at Jacob’s horrified expression.

           

“What?” He shouts.

           

Alice ruffles her short hair and looks up at him from under her lashes. “Carlisle told me I was quite famous. You must be out of the loop.” But she winks at him, and whirls around to the cabinets. “Bella, where are the dinner plates?”

           

Bella joins her at the yellow cabinets, still suppressing her giggles. “Up here.”

           

Jacob looks at the chief and asks dumbly; “What?”

           

Charlie just pats him on the shoulder gruffly. “It’s a long story.”

           

They eat dinner mostly in silence; the boys wolf down their lasagne like it’s air. Jacob eats a whole pan without pausing for breath, and Alice picks at her small slice and observes. Bella looks completely at peace in the little kitchen, though she and Alice are sitting on the counter. There are only three chairs at the little kitchen table and the dining room, with all four of its seats, is buried under the mountain of paperwork that came with Alice. Bella refused to let Alice sit by herself and take the other chair at the table. Alice kicks her feet out and rocks a little as she eats. Bella is almost completely still, eating methodically with a smile on her face.

           

When they’re done, a still slightly shocked Jake walks to the front door with the remaining half of the second lasagne.

           

“Thank you, for fixing the sewing machine.” Alice says, leaning in the staircase, perching on the second step.

           

“No problem,” he says, brows furrowed. He has very strong facial features, thick dark brows and an arched nose, older than the youthful glow to his skin. “did you really come here in a truck?”

           

She nods. Bella looks between the two of them and then to the living room, where Charlie sits, immersed in a play-by-play analysis of some game from weeks ago. No help there, but Alice isn’t bothered by the line of questioning. It seems perfectly natural for him to worry—she is living with the girl he likes, after all. “Yup.”

           

“Did you run away?”

           

She shrugs. “I don’t know.” She softly raps her knuckles on the side of her head. “No memory at all.”

           

“Oh.” He saddens, his massive shoulders curving in. “That… sucks.”

           

She can’t help but let loose a peal of laughter. “I guess.” Then she winks. “But, this is perfectly nice. I’m not sure I’d miss wherever I came from, if I could recall it.”

           

Jacob looks at her like she is the too-tight lid on a Tupperware container and he can’t figure out how to pop her open. After a moment of tense deliberation, in which she stubborn stares into his dark eyes and he looks at her own large blue, he surrenders. She blinks the moisture back into her eyes as soon as she’s won their little competition. “Uh… bye Bella.” He says, then calls into the living room. “Can me and dad come for the game on Saturday?”

           

Charlie gives an affirmative grunt.

           

“See you on Saturday, Jake.” Bella wishes, shooing him out the door. Just before he steps out, she leans in close to whisper, so low Alice can barely hear; “Did Charlie see the bike?”

           

Jake smirks. “Nope. It’s in the back.” Before Bella can say a word, he pulls her into a hug. “I’ll walk it down the street. He won’t notice at all.”

           

Bella sighs in relief. “Cool.”

           

Jacob gives her one last hug, and Alice a parting glance of confusion, before he closes the screen door behind him with enough force to rattle the frame. “Sorry!” He shouts.

           

Bella shoots her a look. “Too strong for his own good.” And Alice nods in agreement.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Later that night, Alice dwells on the only thing she would change about her new life. Her teeth are scrubbed clean and her hair washed, skin moisturized and pyjamas fresh off the sewing machine still warm. Her feet are a little cold. She hovers at the entrance to Bella’s room, looking at the girl curled up with her back to Alice, on the far side of the bed.

           

She just wishes that Bella didn’t have to give so much of her life for Alice. It seems cruel, to make her share the singular bed with a stranger, even if they get along well enough. She climbs in when her feet get cold enough for discomfort, holding out as long as she can, like she does every night. The bed is warm. Maybe Bella hates the arrangement—in her position, anyone would—but Alice loves it; she hates waking up alone. Though she doesn’t suffer from nightmares, waking up beside another person steadies her in the mornings. Sometimes she wakes up with no memories, not even her new ones, and must start all over again piecing her life together in the seconds before her brain fully wakes. Having someone else with her… it eases the cold.

           

She flicks the light out and stares at the dark ceiling, breathing slowly and deeply. Calming herself. “Bella?” She whispers, rolling over so that she faces the girl’s back.

           

“Yeah?” Bella responds, voice groggy with eminent sleep.

           

“Thank you, for taking me in.”

           

Bella rolls over then, looking at her with wide eyes in the dark. Lying there, face to face, they could be sisters. She could be the scared one, crawling into the bed of her closest companion in the wake of a nightmare, or when washed over by sadness. They could be closest friends, if not for the wall that her situation had put between them. She wishes for the golden feeling in her dreams—the shallow kind of companionship she has now, knowing that she is a burden, is bitter and stings like icy hail on her delicate skin. She had nowhere to go, and everywhere she goes it seems she is underfoot. How bad must her life have been before, for her to turn to this?

           

Bella sighs, minty breath brushing across Alice’s face. Sleepiness makes her bold. “Charlie likes you. I do too. Go to sleep.” And then she rolls over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next one!! Will be out sooner!! I swear to god!!!


	7. If I Lay Here?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little girl talk, and one very well-made omelette, lead the girls to an important revelation. Alice misses a chance. 
> 
> Song-- Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! Almost done in under a week! This chapter sets in motion a lot of the more ~important~ things later in the story.

# Chapter Six

## If I Lay Here?

 

They grow close, Alice and Bella.

 

One morning, over breakfast, Alice requests a story from her new best friend. She’s leaning on the edge of the counter, watching Bella twist a pan of scrambled eggs into a complicated spiral. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Bella asked, and Alice grinned.

           

“You’re Chef Bella, who am I to argue with culinary genius?” Bella flushed under her praises. “While you’re cooking, care to tell me about the latest school drama?” The past few days, with Bella’s Dr. Cullen-approved-mini-vacation to watch Alice for a week while she settled in since passed, have been lonely. There are only so many holes she can repair in Charlie’s collection of bland uniform shirts before she wants to rip her eyes out. She’s even read through Bella’s textbooks—boring!

           

Bella groaned. “Alice, nothing happens. I told you—its Forks!” exasperation on her face and in her voice.  

           

Alice shook her head. “Not everything. Dr. Cullen said something about a car accident and his son? There _must_ be a story there.” She pleads.

           

There is a story, at least the brilliant flare of crimson on Bella’s face tells her there’s a story. The girl in question is staring so intently at the eggs that they threaten to combust under her gaze. “It was nothing. E-Edward was just there, when Tyler lost control of his van.”

           

“That,” Alice points her spoon, still dripping tea (she’s found tea is the best—coffee, though Charlie and Bella love it more than life itself, is simply repulsive) at her accusingly. “is not nothing! Tell me, is Edward as cute as his father?”

           

“Alice!” Bella shrieks.

              
She laughs, unrepentant. “It’s true, Carlisle is so handsome! Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, after all your ER visits?” Bella’s answering silence is enough to tell her that the doctor’s charm escapes no-one. Bella resolutely hides behind her hair, poking the eggs quite aggressively. “Alright, alright. No comments on Carlisle, okay? But please tell me the story—the whole story,” she warns, sensing Bella’s attempt to evade attention before she can even try. “about the car crash?”

           

Bella sighs, but gives in. “It, uh, wasn’t that big of a deal. I was just looking at the tires on the back of my truck,” her eyes soften. “Charlie put on snow chains, I guess I was distracted. Tyler spun out on the ice, and the van almost hit me.” She pauses, and puts the egg on a plate. She doesn’t hand it to Alice though, she stares at the elegantly formed omelette with creases of worry in her face. “Edward got there so fast. One second, I swear he was across the parking lot, and the next he was—he was _right there_ , pushing the van back with his shoulders.” She chuckles without humour. “It’s stupid, Dr. Cullen says I hit my head, but I swear he lifted the van off my legs, just before it would have put me in a wheelchair.” Bella finally pushes the omelette to her.

           

“Thanks Bells,” Alice says, shoving a bite into her mouth. “what happened after?” She demands around her mouthful.

           

“Someone called the ambulance.” Bella groans, looking at Alice pitifully. “Everyone was in the waiting room, it was awful. And going there, they put me in a neck brace! Edward rode in the ambulance too—up front, the jerk. And after, he acted like I was crazy! Told me I hit my head and was ‘confused’. Then, three weeks later, he pulls out in front of me and Tyler comes up to my window and asks me to prom—and Edward is smirking in his stupid,” Bella slams the egg pan into the sink. “shiny” the spoon makes a ‘ding’ as she nearly throws it. “Volvo!”

           

“That’s… really weird.” And a lot like the Jasper in her visions. “Bella, does Carlisle have a son named Jasper?”

           

Bella nods.

           

“What does he look like?”

           

She gives Alice an odd look, but speaks anyway. “He’s really tall, even taller than Emmett, and he’s giant. Blond hair, sort of wavy, about here,” Bella makes a motion just below her chin. “but he scares everybody.”

 

“Why?”

 

Bella shrugs. “Jessica told me he always looks like he’s in pain but really, he always looks… restrained. I don’t know. Like he’s always stuck in fight or flight mode. He looks at everybody like they’re going to attack him.”   

           

This should scare her. She’s intrigued instead. “Got a yearbook?”

           

After a few minutes of fishing in the black hole under Bella’s bed, they pull out the Forks High yearbook and flip to the page of ‘C’ names. There’s a whole line of them; gorgeous people with perfect smiles and distant eyes. In the middle of all the smiles is the frowning face of a man, skin catching the light like camera flashes off diamond, only hazy and vague. His amber eyes bore into her through the paper. So he is real. Her omelette is on top of the bed, getting cold.

           

She resists the urge to kiss the page.

 

“You know, he does look a little haunted.” Alice says idly, running her fingers along the curve of his paper face. “Don’t you think so? I wonder what his life has been like, to make him look like that.”

 

“Maybe he was in a bad home? The Cullens are all foster kids.” Bella replies, but its hollow, and they both know that empty and yet alert look runs deeper than they can guess.

           

Alice picks up her omelette from the bed and shoves it at Bella. “Eat, you’re going to be surprised by this.”

           

Bella sticks the fork in her mouth. “Hmm, this is pretty good. Do you believe me about Edward?” Her voice is quiet, vulnerable. She watches the portrait of Edward and chews robotically. It’s the sound of someone who knows the truth but can’t accept it; she wants desperately for Alice to tell her she’s not crazy.

           

“Absolutely. Would you believe me if I told you I dreamed about Jasper every night I can remember?”

           

Bella stops eating.

           

“Now, don’t freak out.” Bella nods, hesitantly picking up a bite. “I saw myself living here, before I knew you or Charlie.” Bella puts down the fork, and Alice rushes to explain. “A vision, I have these visions where I black out and then, I think it must be the future.”

           

“You see the future?”

           

Alice frowns at the plain disbelief in Bella’s voice. “You just told me a teenage boy saved you from a van smushing you with his bare hands. It’s not like I see everything—just that I saw myself yelling up the stairs to Charlie that dinner was ready, and you were in the kitchen when I was in the hospital. And this morning I saw you making cherry pie tonight. And I saw, well, I see, Jasper and myself.”

           

Bella gives her a cautious nod of acceptance. “Okay?

           

“Jasper, in my visions, he does strange things; he moves too fast, he picks me up like I weigh nothing, he…” She frowns, not sure how to describe the strange emotional shifts that he brings about in her. “Changes emotions? He can change how I feel, make me happier when I’m sad.”

           

“Alice, what are you saying?”

           

“I’m not _saying_ anything, just that it seems odd that Edward can do the same inhuman things that my ang-- that Jasper, can.”

 

“I mean, it could be a coincidence?” Bella offers.

 

Alice shakes her head. “Have you ever seen one of the Cullens in the sunlight? Jasper, his skin, it… sparkles! It looks like it’s made of tiny diamonds.”

 

Bella tugs the yearbook to lie between them, and puts aside the plate to push her hair behind her ear. “The Cullens always go on trips when the weather is nice.”

 

“Exactly! When I see him in my visions, Bella, it’s like his skin is covered in cracked diamonds and its… it’s beautiful.”

           

Bella looks conflicted, so she grabs the plate and resumes eating Alice’s breakfast. Alice can see the gears turning in her head while she munches on the omelette, chewing slowly, bite after bite, until the whole thing is gone. Then she walks downstairs and places the plate in the sink, running water over it. She picks up the yellow sponge, pours soap and makes to start the dishes. Alice taps her feet nervously the whole time, but Bella never picks up a dish to wash. She drops the sponge into soapy water with a splash, and turns to Alice. “Jake said something to me, a long time ago, about the Cullens. Said it was ‘tribal superstition’ but it always seemed too real. The Quileute’s, the tribe at the rez, have this legend about a treaty. With the ‘cold ones’.” Bella sinks onto her elbows on the counter. “Jake’s dad, and a lot of the older people there, won’t go to the hospital since Dr. Cullen came.”

           

“What do you think?” Alice asks her. She gets a sincere, pursed-lip expression back.

           

“I think that Jake said something about the old treaty, seventy years ago, being with the Cullens.”

 

Alice makes to open her mouth, but the distant look in Bella’s brown eyes halts her words. “Not a new generation—I quote, ‘they just moved back’.”

           

“So… the Cullens lived here a long time ago?” Alice doesn’t quite understand what Bella is pushing towards her, doesn’t get the looming moment of realization until it’s upon her. “Wait. The same Cullens? The same people?”

           

Bella gives her a slow nod. “Jake said he didn’t believe it, but I think deep down he does. There is something... different about them. They sit by themselves at lunch, they never seem to be around when it’s nice out… Edward was my lab partner.” Bella smiles sadly, before her expression dips to a frown. “But he freaked out, the first day when I walked into class. I saw him in the main office later, begging to move to a different class.” Bella’s wounded expression makes her look like a lost deer, alone in the woods with hunters pressing in.

           

“I believe you, Bella.”

           

They share relieved grins when Bella says softly, “I believe you too.”.

           

“Why?” Alice can’t help but ask.

           

Bella shrugs. “It’s about as crazy as Edward is. And, I was going to make pie tonight.”

           

Alice laughs, high peals that ring in the small kitchen and chip and the edges of thick tension. “I knew it!”

 

 

 

At approximately 3:04 in the morning the next dreary day, the Swan household is woken by the scream of heartbreak.

           

Alice shoots out of bed, pale as a ghost. Pale as her Jasper, pale as his skin the breaking surf of the beach.

           

“Alice?” Bella cries, shooting out of bed and falling over herself, tangled in the sheets.

           

“Truck, beach.” Alice stumbles over her words, lying shock-still in the bed. “Beach, cold beach, beach with no snow.”

           

It feels like there’s sand in her lungs, ice in her throat.

 

Her fingers rip into her shirt over her heart. “White logs like bones. Trees everywhere, there are no people.” Nails draw blood through the cloth. “It is all alone and there he is.” Alice chokes up.

           

“Alice, what’s going on?” Bella cries again, shaking her shoulders. Alice is lost somewhere far away, on her cold beach with the man she loves. He is waiting for her, sitting on the beach with his eyes closed. Only he might not be waiting for her. She can see two paths; the one where she jumps in the truck right now and saves his life, where she dives into the truck and runs into his arms as though she is made of the marble that he is. There is one where she fails, and he sits there until the stone of his skin turns to ash, turns to pebbles, turns to sand in the wind. Her throat was filled with sand when she first woke up.

           

Her arms are freed from their hold. “Bella, please?” She begs, looking at her newfound sister with such hope, such trust. She must trust that Bella can get her there, that she can hit the ground in the forest and run until the soles of her feet are scraped off and she can see him again.  

           

“Okay.” Bella agrees readily. Her voice is still sticky with sleep. She says nothing as they both—Alice stopping to pull off the band that secured her hair in waves as she slept—walk out the door, merely running another errand. “You’re lucky Charlie’s fishing.” Bella says, eyes glued on the dark road. The truck sounds like it’s backfiring and grinding to a halt at the same time, it roars like it shouldn’t run at all. It never fails or falters. 

           

For a moment, sanity comes over her. “Bella, why are you doing this?” Bella shrugs, not looking up from the road. She never does.

           

“What else could I do?” Alice sees them too well—call the hospital; if Dr. Cullen picks it up she’ll be returned and the event explained away, if not she’ll go to an asylum. Charlie doesn’t have a phone to call. Bella calls the police and Alice goes to the asylum. If Bella turns around, she jumps from the moving truck and they never become friends, never get too cook for each other in the kitchen with the yellow cabinets and never become a real family.

           

Or Bella can accept it.

           

“Here, pull over here!” She yells at Bella, already reaching for the door. She’s glad she didn’t put on her seatbelt, because she’s out and sprinting before the truck has rolled to a stop.

 

 

“No!” Alice screeches, slamming into the waking world with violence.

           

Bella is instantly up beside her, hair stuck in her mouth and eyes bleary. “What?”

           

Her heart is beating so loudly she cannot hear anything, cannot feel anything. The knuckles clenching the front of her nightgown are past white, turning a milky blue. Everything seems far away, like she is siting two feet above herself and watching a small, inky-haired girl wheeze on the bed. Detached, she vaguely feels Bella’s arm come round her shoulders.

           

“Alice, are you okay?”

           

“Girls!” Charlie shouts, running into the room and slamming the door back against the wall. She and Bella both jump. “What’s wrong?” Ever a man of action, his gun is clenching tightly in his hands, safety off.

           

“Alice, she woke up screaming.” Bella says, eyeing the gun nervously. Alice herself is still catatonic, still floating. Still hyperventilating, from the sound of her jagged inhales.

           

Bella, understanding more than she ever could awake, presses her arm tighter around Alice, fighting to pull the other from under the mass of tangled blankets. She cannot breathe, she cannot breath. She cannot do anything but fight her way down, fight against the pull that is ripping her from her body and off to that misty beach, to the spot where she will run and meet her Jasper. To the spot where she will feel like home… somehow, she knows that if she could just reach him, life would never be like this again. She’d never wake up sobbing, never need someone to pull her hands from the front of her nightgown because she is too broken to do it herself. She’d never feel like an echo, so fading, so alone in her own body.

           

Like a puppet released from a string, she sobs back into her body.

           

The clock next to her reads 3:09.

           

Alice wails in anguish. The moment has passed; her heart echoes in her chest but faintly, like it is dying inside of her and the rot is spreading. Spreading into her chest and her hands and—and she rips herself from Bella, lurching almost out of the bed. Charlie catches her, but she struggles, tearing her nails. She cannot let them rot. They, they love like she doesn’t. They live here and they love here and they are whole; she is broken, and she has missed her chance to fix herself.

           

“No!” She hollers.

           

“Alice, please!” Bella cries, tears streaming down both of their faces in tandem. “Alice, please, what’s wrong?”

           

“I can’t—I can’t, can’t spread, can’t let it spread!” She whispers, shaking like a leaf.

           

“What?” Charlie asks, slowly levering her back into the bed. She goes without fuss, but her heart is tormented. How can she be so broken that the feel of the rough pads of his fingers on her arms is so warm, so welcome, that she can’t fight it? When she knows that she will only open the same wounds in him that are festering in her?

           

“I don’t want to hurt you.” She chokes out at last, broken.

           

Bella doesn’t say a word, but when Alice’s eyes drift to the door, Charlie is gone and Bella is sitting by her side, arms around her back and propping her up. “Alice, what do you mean?”

           

She waves hopelessly at her heart, and then sags completely. Bella exhales suddenly when Alice’s weight collapses into her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

           

“You’re not?” Bella asks. A tear splashes on the top of Alice’s head—falling from Bella’s eyes, into her hair. Bella pulls her closer into her arms, so that she is nearly curled up in her lap. “You’re not hurting us.”

           

“I missed him, Bella.” Alice sobs out, wishing she could rip herself apart piece by piece and then throw all the chunks into the ocean so she could never come back together “He—He was right there, I know it. Three-oh-four. I missed it.”

           

“Another vision?”

           

She nods. “I… I missed him. How could I miss him?” Her hands ball into the empty space around her heart, pushing it in like it’ll fill if she presses hard enough.

           

“What did you see?” It’s easier for Bella to believe without thinking in the early hours of the morning, when everything is half-mythic and the sobbing girl is nothing but a dream. It is worse for Alice, who has never been allowed to believe, no. She simply must _live_ in this life.

           

“I woke up. Three-oh-four. I made you drive me to the beach, only the road was a mile from the beach. He was waiting for me. I hit the ground running, and I woke up when I knew I was too late.” Bella just doesn’t have anything to say to that, nothing to ease the terrible spreading, sickening, empty that is consuming her. “It hurts, it hurts. It feels like I’m missing pieces and rotting where they should be. I don’t want you getting sick, I don’t want you and Charlie being like me—I don’t want you catching crazy.”

           

“You’re not crazy, Alice. You’re… special.”

           

“You don’t mean that.” She whispers, even as the tension begins to fade from her arms. Bella finally curls her fingers into the tight ball of Alice’s hands and pulls them apart with surprising strength; she holds them, clutching her like a life-line. “You don’t want this, Bella. I’m empty.”

           

Bella breaths deeply, and whispers; “I can’t get your memories back, I can’t bring you Jasper. I’m sorry.” Alice’s protest is on her lips when Bella tucks her head into Alice’s, curling them up like one person. “But my mom used to hold my hand at night, when I couldn’t sleep.” They are both crying; both sobbing for the empty parts of their hearts. Alice’s emptiness, the blackness of panic in her mind, are all suffocating her like clouds on a bright horizon. Clouds right overhead, she cannot escape. Bella’s hand is like the last ray of sun in a twilight. It won’t last, it’s already gone; it’s the only thing Alice has.

 

           

A marble statue missing an arm, broken clean at the shoulder. “Alice!” he shouts, and springs to life to run to her.

 

 

The vision, her name, her broken statue. “Jasper” She whispers the name like a prayer.

           

It isn’t enough; but Alice falls asleep, anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. This story is the worst because I invented a new type of slow burn hell where instead of getting your characters together you just make them suffer and leave half the main pairing completely off screen. :)


	8. You're Everything Beautiful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jasper has always been a man of action, when given hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Wish I Knew You by The Revivalists

# Chapter Seven

## You’re Everything Beautiful

 

Jasper is having a bad week.

 

She is everywhere and nowhere and he is twitchy, on edge, cutting and sharp when he moves. He cannot sleep and yet she haunts him in dreams, black eyes and small mouth and soft smile and blood weeping from red lines on her forehead. She is in the corner of his eye forever and when he turns it is only his own blight of a reflection. Edward relays his every thought. Rosalie shoots daggers from her eyes. If Carlisle gives him one more cautious look, one more veiled assessment, one more worried whisper echoes through the house about his control, he might kill them all.

 

It continues this morning, though he doesn’t mind the sun shining through the windows. It feels like the sweet taste of iced tea, feels like sitting on the porch in the rain and watching endless fields of cotton. If he doesn’t look at himself, it feels like being human.

 

Esme drifts through the downstairs, sweet notes of her happiness trailing up from the kitchen like sweet tobacco, as she mixes sugar and butter in the large copper bowl. The sugar crystals scrape against the metal and prick his eardrums. Carlisle turns pages of a thick book in his study and frets over a case. The worry seeping off him is thick, hovers in the air around him in a tight grey cloud, like smoke off a fire. He doesn’t bother to find Emmett and Rosalie; he knows what they’re doing. Bach plays from Edward’s room. If only it were loud enough to drown out the rest of them thinking.

 

A spike of annoyance from Edward lets Jasper know they’ve both been observing each other.

 

Esme drops vanilla into the butter and sugar, and he finally stands to get ready. He misses the clothes sometimes. Belts bother him, and Rosalie hates his good brown boots. Sometimes, he dreams about crushing her arched eyebrows, sending his fist right through her face.

 

Today, he is wearing a grey sweater with a black button up underneath. The sweater was something Esme selected, the small mothering he concedes to her. Carlisle has the same one. Both are from when they lived in Ireland, and the colour blended into the mist on the moors, grey sliding into grey indefinitely.

 

His room is blue. Esme thinks it ‘encourages a sense of peace’. The jeans he puts on are dark blue too. They’ve been washed enough that the colour is coming loose and warn around the knees, the left ripped from Emmett throwing him into a boulder in Alaska.

 

Carlisle has joined his wife in the big kitchen, both of them glittering and drifting around each other in the light from the glass walls. He and Carlisle have never been the type for talking.

 

Their eyes meet, and Carlisle is the first to look away. God, however distant from them, still judges liars.

 

Jasper listens to the phone calls. He’s read the files. He sees the worry and fear.

 

 _Alice_. She is five-foot-one and she weights 97 pounds, and Carlisle wrote in her file notes that he’d like her to gain at least three pounds by her next check up. She is of Asian descent but from what country is unknown. Her eyes are black. She suffered no broken bones from her injuries. Her blood type is AB. It is estimated she is seventeen years old. She is literate. She suffered massive trauma related to a severe blunt force trauma to the base of her neck that Carlisle cited as probable cause of her amnesia. He could pick her heartbeat from the slurry of Forks without hesitation. He does, late at night when the others have retired to privacy and the company of their mates (or Bach). She smells like lilacs and fresh blood and rain on the ocean and jasmine and green tea and the colour of the sky at dusk. She is lonely. He cannot see her because he could kill her, so Carlisle says.

 

Rosalie presses heavy on the horn of her car in the driveway, and he clenches the backpack strap in his hand. He tips his head to Carlisle and walks out the front door.

 

 

High school is suffocating. Emotions are dense and pungent, like the people. Sharp misery rolls off Edward in waves when they finally sit to lunch. Rosalie and Emmett curled around each other at the table waiting. Years have dulled his mind to the sound of crowds, though his throat still burns keenly.

 

“Have you hunted enough?” Rosalie asks him under her breath, the words a whisper in the hurricane of the cafeteria noise.

 

“Always.” He replies curtly.

 

Edward straightens in his chair, eyeing the couple suspiciously. “Rosalie, let it go. He’s fine.”

 

“Can’t I show sisterly concern?” She smiles. The dig of her nails into Emmett’s skin is almost cracking his arm.

 

“Not until you mean it, Rosalie.” He never got headaches like this fighting in the South. No time for arguing when there were bodies to break under marble fingers and cities to stalk.

 

“Stay out of my head.” She hisses quietly, then smiles at Emmett. “Want to skip? I want to stretch my legs.”

 

Emmett shrugs his massive shoulders and grins. Though he can’t change emotions like Jasper can, Emmett’s contentment is softening her tension. They match today, in the subtle way that decades together encourage; Rosalie in her jeans and camisole with Emmett’s old green Dartmouth varsity jacket draped across her shoulders, and Emmett in a faded Woodstock tee that was once forest green.

 

Jealousy washes over the students, and several tables whisper to themselves, as the pair stand and make their way through the lunch room. Jasper wants to lay down and never move again.

 

Alas, lilacs and salt water perfume the air just as raw fear ignites inside Edward. Isabella Swan has just stumbled into the cafeteria, clutching a box lunch and scanning nervously for her friends.

 

Her clothes smell of Alice.

 

“She doesn’t smell like lilacs. She smells like… like blood. And honey.” Edward mutters through clenched teeth. A quick glance reveals him to be hunched over on himself and pressing a hand to his nose. “I should go.”  

 

“She’s by the door.” A flaw in the otherwise brilliant plan of running away from poor Isabella for the rest of this round of high school. It’s a pity that Edward can’t comprehend the nuances of the emotions that Isabella feels; the worry and insecurity, the delight when Edward walks into a room crushed shortly by shame and resentment. The vague nerves that plague her, about what he can only guess.

 

“I can see that.” A touch of annoyance slips through the anger. Jasper would smirk, if the situation weren’t marred by his thoughts. The best part of schooling with Isabella Swan is that Jasper can catch a break from the mind reading for just a moment and plot. It doesn’t take long to plan the attack.

 

Sparing just a glance for Edward and finding him deep into a depressive spiral, Jasper stands and walks across the room in carefully measured paces.

 

The lilacs meld with Isabella’s scent and her blood smells thicker than Alice’s.

 

“Isabella?” He asks politely, stopping three feet away. Her heart rate accelerates but what she feels is still cloudy under the layer of _Alice_ that she wears like a second skin. He can’t focus on anything else.

 

“Umm, yes?” She responds meekly. A boy nearly hits her outstretched elbow with his lunch tray and only Jasper’s quick reach for her arm saves her arm from becoming covered in mystery lunch meat. Amber highlights flash in her hair as she twists, exposing the curve of her neck, to look at her elbow. “Oh, thanks.”

 

“My pleasure.” He responds with a nod of his head. Edward is seething in the background, and Jasper is careful to keep his fingers loosely wrapped around her arm as he pulls her gently from the entrance towards her lunch table. She only teeters for a second before letting herself be guided towards her table. “I was hoping for a chance to speak with you.”

 

“Me?”

 

He nods. “About Alice.” The muscles of her wrist clench, and he releases her slowly. “My apologies.”

 

“No problem. I could use the help, honestly.” Isabella shrugs. “What about Alice?”

 

 _Does she love him. What is Carlisle trying so hard to hide. Is she doing alright. Is she happy. Can he meet her. Could she ever love someone like him. What stories has she heard about the Cullens. Does she love him. Does she know he exists._ “How is she?”

 

Lavender coloured happiness blooms from her. “I think she likes it here. We spent a lot of time together.” Lord above, he hopes its true. If he could see for himself with his own eyes, know truly that she is happy and safe, he would. Isabella tucks her hair behind her ear and drops her lunch to the table, hesitating before taking her seat. “She’s like my sister. Why?”

 

Because he was the one that opened that truck. Drawn in by the smell of flowers and the ocean and carnal bloodlust. That she’d weakly opened her lips and whispered his name. That he’d felt time stop. That suddenly, all the mauling of his body and his soul were smoothed away, that she was a saint and her fragile smile had opened the gates of heaven for a wretched creature like him. She’d baptised him with a gentle silver light, her face had shown clear through the rushing water that had drowned him for all these years. No longer was he a monster, if a saint could smile upon him so. He had thought of nothing but her since that moment.  She’d been sent from above, and he knew, in that moment he knew because she had whisper the gospel in his ear, that she had been sent for him.

 

But he could not be saved.

 

“Carlisle, he worries.” Jasper says instead and it physically hurts like he hasn’t felt in a century.

 

Isabella is surprised, but it’s the doubt and disappointment that make him stay for just a moment, to exchange just a few more words with her. “Am I intruding?” He can’t help but ask.

 

“No! Actually, well…” She pulls on the sleeve of her large green sweater, tugging it off her shoulder. “Maybe, if he can, Dr. Cullen can some and check on her. Alice misses him, a lot, I think. You could too, maybe, if you’d like…”

 

Speak. He needs to speak. “Thank you for the invitation.” He starts.

 

Isabella closes her eyes and breathes out at once. “She dreams about someone.”

 

Jasper utterly freezes.

 

Edward stands from their table and walks hastily towards them.

 

“An angel, she says.”

 

Jasper watches her shoulders pull back and her eyes meet his with iron strength from her seat.

 

“She called him Jasper.”

 

He is terrified, but he runs to her anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Alice wakes up in the Swan household alone; even the dishwasher, which Bella seems to run constantly, is still. Bella left her a note on the counter; ‘Had to leave for school, hot chocolate in the saltine box. Don’t tell Charlie –Bella’. Alice thinks about making the hot chocolate, but her stomach hurts and her head is still ringing from last night’s awful dream. She doesn’t want to look at the clock, for fear that another missed moment will come crashing down on her. For fear that she’s missed Jasper again.

           

So, she retires to the spinning stool in front of her sewing machine. She doesn’t sew; she sits there and stares vacantly out the window, trying to guess the time in her self-imposed abstinence. The sky is so thick and heavy with rain clouds, the kind that could open any moment but will only do so the second she steps a foot outside, that she can’t tell if the time is noon or midnight. Maybe time is meaningless.

           

Maybe everything is meaningless? Alice stands and paces the little living room, running her fingers along the slightly dusty line of photos, all of Bella throughout her school years. What is school like? Did she go to a nice school, one with lots of colourful people like Forks High? Did she go to prom and dance, wear a gorgeous dress? It’s not the first time she’s wondered about the life she left behind, and certainly not the first time she wished she knew what she was missing out on now, but it is the first time that the glowing possibility of _Jasper_ is tinged with regret for the past. For all she knows, Jasper is the past. Maybe she made him up. Maybe Alice hit her head too hard and made everything up.

           

Maybe she’s alone in the hospital right now in a coma.

           

Her wandering feet have led her to the back door, left open by Bella this morning. The sky has opened up and rain falls so heavy she can barely see. For all that her best friend is adamantly opposed to the rainy weather of Forks, she spends a lot of time outside. Alice wonders what Bella’s looking for, out in the endless green of the forest. If she walked out there, what would she find? What would she look for?

           

She wouldn’t look for Jasper.

           

Because he’s standing two feet in front of her, in the pouring rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit is going down. The next chapter is edited and ready to go!!! I can't wait to post it!!!
> 
> You may have noticed that the chapter count was upped. I didn't originally end this on a cliff hanger. I read it again, and chipped off the last few paragraphs (which were the beginning of the original chapter 7) and then added the whole section told by Jasper. I am evil. Oops. 
> 
> Things are going to get a little rough after this because I'm not fond of the second half of this, so I'll have to do a little editing before it goes up. For now, enjoy the cliff hanger.


	9. Where I Follow You’ll Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice chases Jasper into the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I can't believe I'm finally getting this chapter out!!! It's a little all over the place but honestly I'm SO READY for this!!
> 
> Song: Collide by Howie Day

# Chapter Eight

## Where I Follow You’ll Go

 

Her first reaction is to cry. Not the loud wailing of someone in pain, but the endless stream of tears that fall like the torrential rains outside.

           

When did it start raining? Jasper is soaking wet; his blond curls plastered to the sides of his face and neck, water running in miniature rivers off the bridge of his nose, dripping down and getting lost in the infinite number of other little raindrops falling. He is so still, so white, so cold, that the blue lines on his neck are rivers in the marble and the dark shadows underneath his eyes are smudges of smoke. He is a statue of a god; no, he is the god, frozen in stone, lost forever in the endless past when people still paid him offerings in ash and smoke. Offerings of burnt up hearts, like hers. God, she can feel pieces of her mind fall like chips from a poker player’s hand, clattering dully to the floor in the shock of total loss.

           

“Miss?” He asks her, the word falling softly from his lips like a prayer, deep in his southern accent and lodging itself deep in her heart.

           

Alice blinks, and he is gone.

           

“No.” She says, shivers trailing down her back.

 

“No!” She shouts into in the never ending green forest, calling out to her love with all her might. “No!” But he isn’t coming back. Nothing moves but everything; everything moves but the pale marble man she wishes would come marching out of the forest to her. Saving her.

           

“Please?” Alice tries, pulling at the hem of her nightgown. “I-I don’t know if you’re still there, but if you are, please come back.” He left her with a cavity in her chest, right where her heart should be. “Please come back.”

           

Her feet are icy in the slush that covers the lawn. The forest comes closer, so much so that her first thought is that the woods around her are closing in before she comes back down into her body and realizes that her feet are carrying her into the forest. Inside the woods is a torrential world of green and yellow and blue; a slice through the thick layers of a Van Gogh, a Monet, crashing around her in waves and ripples. Everything moves, every leaf on every branch shaking under the onslaught of water. Alice is shaking too.

           

Her feet are carrying her further and further into the woods, chasing an emotion like love. Can she feel it, a real and tangible thing, in the air around her?

 

The trudging speed of her legs picks up. Something sharp stabs into the bottom of her foot and she stumbles, almost hitting the ground.

 

 

White hands, strong and lined with blue, reach for her falling body.

 

 

Alice catches herself on her knees, the wind knocked from her lungs. Damn those visions. She scrambles up again before she can think to stop. Branches reach out for her face like the long fingers of nightmares, and the world is ever darkening. Has the rain every made her so sad? Ever made the sky so dark its beyond night, ever made her wonder if it would drown the planet in one never-ending flood?

 

“I can’t.” She whispers, agonized. Pained by the broken way that she speaks and the broken way that he doesn’t respond, standing there like carved ice. If she feels enough, loves him with enough force, would he melt? Would she?

 

In a small clearing ahead, white flashes in the dark of the storm. “Jasper!” She cries, running full force, ignoring the way the forest tries to pull her to the ground, the snags and rips at her nightgown. “Jasper, come back!” She wails. She doesn’t recognise the clearing or the woods around her. She doesn’t recognise anything; she never does, with so little memory and so little experiences to make up for it. She likes to watch the world from Bella’s bedroom window and imagine that the stray cars passing late at night are for her, that one of them stop and then Jasper will open the door and knock quietly on their front door. That he’ll come right in to her house and deliver all her memories in neat little packages and with him, with him being with her, all her troubles will disappear.  

           

She skids to a halt. Water streams down her face, like the rain doesn’t care she’s standing there.

           

Jasper, back to her across the clearing, doesn’t seem to care either.

           

“The rain doesn’t care about either of us.” Alice states, not moving. “It just falls and falls all the time—do you know how hard it was for me to find you?” He shakes his head, shaking loose even more rain from the golden halo. It’s sticking to his cheeks; she wonders what it looks like, dried without care after being soaked by rain. “It was really hard.” She looks at her legs, somewhere deep in her brain aware she’s covered in scrapes that bleed in huge rivers down her legs, probably on her arms and face too. Rainwater and blood come off her in red rivets. Nothing but icy rain, clean as if it was still in the sky, falls from him.

           

“Won’t you say anything?” She asks, pitiful. “I know you’re there, really there, this time.” She knows he can’t answer those questions. She knows—and she wants answers anyway.

           

“You know,” her voice is raising, desperation and emptiness morphing into anger. Her jaw itches to yawn, emotions make her tired. “I woke up with no memory. Nothing—except for you.” She takes a few hesitant steps to him, and when he doesn’t react, greedily takes a few more. “I keep seeing images of this life that I haven’t lived yet. It’s always you, Jasper, day after day and night after night. I keep dreaming and seeing and wishing, and I don’t _understand_!” She’s yelling, water in her mouth and her nose, filling her eyes. “I have nothing! Nothing, nothing but you and you won’t—you don’t—I don’t…” She chokes up, dizzy.

           

The water in her mouth is hard to breath around. It gurgles in her throat when she tries to speak, to yell again. To tell him of the endless nights in the cold hospital with Carlisle as her only friend and the lonelier days, wandering the halls. Of the times that she watches Bella and Charlie from the top of the stairs, sitting and watching them speak. Of watching the effortless affection and connection between Bella and Jacob. It hurts her, that no-one ever touches her. She remembers every clinical poke and prod of Carlisle, every time Bella bumped into her in the hall. Even in her visions, the smoky illusion of her hands on Jasper’s cold skin. It’s hard being lonely when she doesn’t have anything to sooth her; the past is as lonely as the present, as devoid of her love and the life that she was living or will be living soon or something in between, and she wants to leave them both. Leave it all behind and _run._

           

She runs. She places one foot in front of the other and runs, bolting across the clearing until she is just behind Jasper.

           

Then the forest takes her down, one careful stone that her heel slips out on, mossy and wet.

 

White hands, strong and lined with blue, reach for her falling body. (Finally, she thinks, finally something comes true.)

 

White hands, strong and lined with blue, around her waist and her shoulders, hovering her an inch from the ground. The dirt is black, splashing up to sully the little green shoots just beginning to come up. There are spots ripped up by the tread of Jasper’s heavy boots.

 

“I knew you’d catch me.” Alice whispers.

           

“Sorry Miss.” Jasper says, voice low and tremoring. “Sorry to let you fall.” He rights her, setting her back on her feet like she’s a garden rose, toppled over in the wind.

           

It’s amazing, the change that occurs when he takes a half-step back from her. The change that has come over her since the moment he stopped running from her, stopped in the clearing and let her approach. Warmth, heavy and heady and thick with comfort is seeping over her. Like sitting in front of an open fire after being outside for so long that you forgot for cold it was outside. That’s what it was; she felt the cold when she woke up alone in the hospital, and she just got so damn used to it that until moments ago, watching him from the porch, she’d forgotten how the heat of a roaring fire could seep into her bones and shake all the sadness from her. Now, it’s like she’s inside after walking through a snowstorm. Still dripping her wet clothes, her bare feet still wet and muddy in the earth, but warming inch by inch, second by second, thawing from the direction that faces towards Jasper.

 

How long is it that she stares, memorizing the lines of silver and white that desecrate his face? How long does she stare into his half-lidded amber eyes, darkening around the edges like night creeping over the desert? It could be minutes, it could be hours, it could be years. How she longs to reach up and kiss away the furrow in his brow; to let him into the home she’s created for him in her heart. He looks nearly as lost as she used to feel; the deep scars of his face age him immensely, and the weary stance of a soldier still lost on the battlefield tell her so. The questioning hope in his eyes tells her more.

           

“It’s alright,” She reassures him, reaching up to touching a stream of water on his face. It runs over her hand instead; she is nothing but an extension of the things that happen to him. “you always catch me.”

 

She thinks there should be a moment when everything changes. Maybe it’s already happened—some softening of his posture so small that she couldn’t feel it until she thought about it. Some shift in the coldness in his eyes until they shine down on her like golden suns. Maybe there doesn’t need to be. Maybe he wants to feel warm just as much as she does. Some sacrifice by him, letting go of whatever was keeping him so far from her.

 

“I try.” He dips his head, as if tipping a hat he’s not wearing. His height, or rather her lack thereof, makes the gesture just rain little droplets down on her. She’d hadn’t noticed before, but the rain is blowing to sideways; he’s been shielding her.

           

“I know.” She cups his face. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

           

He quirks his lips in a tiny smile. “I’ve heard. Carlisle was worried.”

           

Alice blushes, amazed at the simplicity of the reaction after the chase through the woods. “I heard him, once or twice, on the phone. Talking to Esme, worried about you, worried about me!”

           

Jasper just laughs, rolling, low and deep. “He was worried about you, because of me.”

           

Alice crosses her arms, fresh tears springing to her eyes. “I don’t know why he didn’t just tell me. I thought, you know, that it was just too convenient that his son was named Jasper and he and you were so handsome—and Carlisle is too young to be a doctor—but I didn’t want to push him, because he was so worried when I told him about the visions but Bella told me she believed me and I woke up last night crying so hard all the blood vessels in my face are broken and…” she trails off, rambling.

           

“May I take you somewhere warmer?” He asks, offering his arm. He pulls it back though, winced as his gaze flickers over her, too fast to track. She’s shaking like a little leaf. “I won’t leave.” He promises, looking at her with sincerity in his eyes—but his words are convincing her as well as himself. His presence is like balm on the open wound of her heart, the continued moments in his glow are stitches putting her back together gently but firmly.

           

“Of course.” She breaths out. He makes her dizzy.

           

Jasper grins, then sweeps her off her feet.    

 

“Jasper?” She asks, already tucking her face into his chest, curling into the bridal hold he has. “Please be gentle. I’m only human.” She smiles into his shirt, and he clenches her tighter. Just a little too tight—it’ll leave a bruise, where his arms wrap around her torso and beneath her legs, and the marble pads of his fingers dig into her soft flesh.

           

In truth, the running is much worse and much better than she expected. She’s seen the way they move before; seen Jasper flash inch-long points of teeth as he runs fast as a hummingbird’s wings in the woods, hunting something or someone. She’s seen him jump and run and find his way to her within seconds of her wishing him there. So, she doesn’t miss anything by keeping her eyes closed and focused on the smell of rain and the undertow of _Jasper_ , magnolias and gunpowder, the south at war in the summertime. As a person, Jasper could be completely still for all she shifts within his secure hold. It is merely the world that moves around them. But, it still moves faster than she can ever recall the world moving for her.

           

He rights her on her feet on the front steps, the lights shining from all the windows of the house out onto the dark lawn making her vertigo worse. Jasper never lets her go, but she wishes he’d pick her up again. Her eyes slide upwards and she tips down, down, down to the side—until she is back up in his arms like she never felt, calming her swirling vision with the scent of his dark shirt. Her hand fisted in a shirt darkened with rain, another precious vision come true. Alice hadn’t noticed the darkness around her, but then again, she couldn’t tell how long she’d been running or how long she’d spent chasing Jasper. It was clear to her though that she’d spent a very long time staring at him in the clearing, watching rain pool in the divots of his scars. One, above his cheek, had caught too much and overflowed like fat tears.     

           

Her body is bent carefully and she leans more heavily on his chest, freeing Jasper’s hand to bang firmly on the back door twice. Folded in as she is, she cannot see Charlie’s face, but she can imagine it; the horror, the shock, the lines of stress that age him. It seems all she does is cause trouble. Here, in her love’s arms, she decides; no more trouble. It is her mission in life to repay Charlie for all she owes him (she owes him a lot) and she starts right now.

           

“Hi Charlie.” She whispers, still pressed into Jasper’s chest. The man in question walks into the back door and around something by the pattern of her footsteps, and walks to the couch in the living room with firm, military-drilled, perfect footfalls. “I’m sorry.” She whispers as she’s placed on the couch—but she doesn’t let go of Jasper’s shirt. His amber eyes are uncertain, but he kneels beside her quickly, pressing his own cold hand completely around her small fist.

           

“What. Happened.” The stiff tone is obviously directed at Jasper.

           

“Sir, I was hiking.” Jasper begins, calm rolling over the room like fog over a harbour. “Emmett and I got separated,” Jasper shoots her a minute look, a tiny quirk of his mouth at the corner. “and I started towards town. I caught Alice in a clearing, and brought her home.” She doesn’t miss the emphasis on ‘home’. Subtle, Jasper.

           

“Alice?” Bella calls, and Alice weakly lifts her head. It must be Jasper, the tiredness she feels. Maybe it’s just the endless cycle of emotional extremes she’s been through today. Maybe she’s just cried out and needs a nap, like a little girl.

           

“Hi.” Alice replies, giving a weak little wave. Bella is frozen at the foot of the stairs; tears since dried have left maps on her face. The waterworks today have been spectacular.

           

“I was so worried!” Bella cries, flinging herself into Alice, slipping across the room on her socks. Alice has her arms outstretched for the embrace when Jasper springs to life, prying her hands from his shirt too quick for a human and standing up just a bit too fast as well, arm flung in front of Alice. She swats at his arm, weakly, peering at her best friend from under the limb.

           

“She’s hurt.” Jasper states firmly, in that ‘I’m ordering you’ voice of his. She keeps forgetting about the cuts on her legs and arms, and they do sting, but not as much as they should. Jasper’s hands find seem to find themselves brushing along the edge of a vicious tear in the sleeve of her nightgown, where the silk is stained brown. It looks far worse than it is, thanks to the rain. Charlie doesn’t miss that gesture; his eyes harden and his posture stiffens. 

           

“Should I call Carlisle?” Charlie asks.

           

“Yes.” Jasper says before she can get a word in.

           

“I’m fine.” She says, wrinkling her nose.

           

“I’ll get the kit from the—oh no.” Bella says rearing back dangerously far. Charlie’s hands press into her back seconds before she sways fatally far back. “Blood.” She says with a faint smile, apologetically. Charlie escorts her upstairs after exchanging a nod with Jasper. His thin black phone is in his hands and his fingers click against the screen for a mere five seconds before he is back to his crouch, hovering his hands over the side of her face.

           

“I’m fine.” She tells him, crossly.

           

“You knew me before we met.” He states, one strong brow raised and disregarding her lies.

           

She nods, a little guilty. She wonders when he’ll realise he lifted his spell of sleepiness. “I did. My first memory,” she pauses, the sacred thing not willing to part from her mouth. “is of you. Saying my name.” She lies. For all of his superhuman abilities, she cannot define what he is. Whatever it is (he’s perfect just being Jasper, alone, himself and utterly unique to her) she’s confident that no-one wants to hear that they bite someone and cause them extreme suffering. Maybe Carlisle will tell her, now that she can berate him for keeping this wonderful love from her all those months.

           

“Why?” He asks.

           

At first, she wants to say that she doesn’t know. But it’s so much more than that; they both know, they both know it was some sort of higher power, some merciful god that lifted her curse and brought Jasper to her. Even in the moments she’s had him, those sacred memories she’ll forever guard. “Love.” She says softly, after a moment’s deliberation.

           

He breaths deeply, pain in his eyes. They’re near black now, the last amber clinging to the centre. With his irises so narrow, it looks like the light at the end of a tunnel, creeping around a door. “You should… find someone better.”

           

Alice frowns. “Better?” How could anything be better than this? Well, if he would quit hovering his hand over her face like she’s made of crystal and sooth her. With the icy temperature of his skin, it would be like a summers breeze on her burning heart.

           

“Alice,” He pauses, and she can see the wait of many lifetimes of suffering in his eyes. Unexpectedly, anger flares up inside her; who dared to hurt him?  “I am broken.”

           

She barely listens. “No.”

           

He blinks. “I don’t deserve you.”

           

“You,” She pokes him in the chest. He doesn’t give, so her index finger bends back a little the wrong way. “deserve everything. Jasper, and though I doubt you knew it, you saved me in that hospital. I would have gone mad, I almost did, without something, some shred of hope. You’re hope to me. And I love you, so the matter is settled.” She crosses her arms for good measure, fixing him with the sternest expression she can muster. He looks so forlorn.     

           

“I-”

           

“Nope!” Alice presses her little hand, bluish with cold, to his lips. “You can’t break up with me when we’ve just met.”

           

“Alice,” he says, finally smiling faintly against her hand. “I’ve been waiting for you too.”

 

* * *

 

 

Jasper must succeed in lulling her to sleep, because Alice blinks her bleary way into the world to the sound of the screen door slamming and urgent voices.

           

“Urgh” She groans and rolls over. It pulls on a handful of small scrapes that sting. “Oww.”

           

“Alice?” Asks a familiar southern voice, and she grins into the sofa cushion.

           

Before she can respond to the love of her life, her everything, her saviour today and always, a harsh voice interrupts. “Jasper.” It grits out, and she pauses a moment before she connects the slight British lilt to the calming voice of Carlisle.

           

Carlisle. Oh, she has things to tell him. Things to yell.

           

“Carlisle. Thank you for coming.” Jasper says coolly.

           

“I didn’t come on your behalf.” Ouch.  

           

She must intervene. “Don’t be mean, Carlisle.” She reprimands. “You’ve been more than mean, so whatever issue you have with Jasper I suggest you keep to yourself.” Maybe she’s a little harsh, but she means it. It hurts to know that she was missing this, her fingers wrapped around Jaspers and the light in her heart, the whole time and her supposed helper was keeping it from her. She just hopes the anger comes through, when her voice is sleepy.

           

“Alice,” Carlisle says, bending down beside Jasper, beginning to pull a pair of sterile tweezers from a black briefcase. “this is beyond you, I’m sorry. I never meant to involve you in something so dangerous.” Thankfully Jasper still holds her hand, so she has something to squeeze.

           

“I got hit by a truck Carlisle, I’ve got no memories, and I spent two months in a hospital. I don’t know how realizing I’m not completely insane and simultaneously finding the missing spark of hope in my otherwise mostly miserable life is dangerous.”

           

The doctor, to his credit, does look appropriately chastised. “My apologies. The Cullens,” He gestures to himself and Jasper with a bloody piece of leaving in his tweezers. “are different. I simply wish for your safety.” Her anger sours into resentful acceptance. How can he be so caring, enough to make her sympathize when he did, in fact, hurt her?

           

“On the subject of safety,” Carlisle says to Jasper, looking very young and very close to smirking. “how is she still alive?”

           

Alive? Scrapes aren’t life threatening.

           

Jasper sighs. “I have no idea.”

           

“Doesn’t the blood bother you? I can handle this.” Carlisle presses his hand to Jasper’s shoulder.

           

He shrugs it off, straightening his back. “She’s quite determined that I stay.” The accent is thicker, the ‘I’ a drawled ‘ah’ sound.

           

“Wait, why would blood bother him?” Alice demands of the doctor.

           

Carlisle and Jasper exchange a look. “I thought you say the future, Alice?” The former asks.

           

“I do, that doesn’t mean I know _everything_.” Her tone is blatantly patronizing and she does not care.

           

“This complicates matters.” He explains, pulling a roll of gaze out and a bottle of stinging antiseptic. “This will sting-”

           

“A little.” She finishes. “And that wasn’t me telling the future.” She counters his victorious glance at Jasper. “You just said those words to me every day for months. They’re lies.”

           

He smiles at her, before pressing the antiseptic to an especially deep cut. She hisses through her teeth. Jasper glares at Carlisle and he glares back; she wishes they both would stop arguing and someone would explain to her exactly why Carlisle thinks she’s in so much danger from falling over in the woods and loving Jasper. Who, aside from a set of twin hand-shaped bruises she can feel coming in on her upper arm and just above the outside of her knee, has literally only protected her.

           

“Dr. Cullen?” Calls a timid voice from the stairs, and all three of them look up from their tense staring to the sight of Bella, waxy and pale, and Charlie hovering behind her, unused to the role of helicopter parent.

           

Instantly, the anger fades from his eyes and a gently compassion waves over him, easing the line of his shoulders into something open and peaceable. Jasper ushers a wave of relaxation over the room. “Bella, how are you?”

           

Bella eyes Alice warily. “Are you still bleeding?”

           

She gives herself a glance. During the glare-off he had kept working; she is still dinged up and scratched, but none of them are deep to still bleed. “Nope, you’re all safe. Are you afraid of blood?” Alice asks.

           

She shakes her head. “No, it’s the smell, all... iron-y and heavy…” Alice doesn’t miss the way Jasper’s mouth tenses and Carlisle ponders the statement. “But I’m fine. Alice, are you… okay?”

           

Alice uses her free hand to give a thumb up. “I’m great!”

           

The three men collectively sigh. “Alice, I’m going to bandage these and I’d like you to keep them covered for two days, okay?” She nods. “Jasper, Esme is worried sick about you.” Taking one last look around at the room, he nods to Charlie as he fastens his case. “I’ll call to arrange a time to check up on Alice. My apologies for not staying longer, but Esme and I were making plans that I feel I should get back to. I’ll get the car.”

           

Charlie gives him a grateful nod, and then rounds on Jasper. And Alice too, but most of the anger is certainly for Jasper. “What. Happened.” He grits out.

           

“I ran away!” Alice chirps. “You know, it’s very frustrating not being able to remember anything. Sometimes I just want to rip my hair out—after that horrible nightmare last night, I guess I was all shaken up.” She looks at Charlie through her lashes, her best pout on. “I’m sorry Charlie, I was just so overwhelmed…”

           

He looks horrendously uncomfortable. “Well, I’m, uh, glad you’re back. And safe. Thanks.” He mutters the last part to her blond companion.

           

Outside, a car honks.

           

“Sorry, Alice.” Jasper whispers as he stands, slowly slipping his fingers from between hers. Where she’d clutched his shirt has left creases. They look like his scars. He turns to Charlie, standing with that uncanny straight back and broad-shouldered pride that he has. “May I come, for Alice, tomorrow?” He asks quietly. Alice thinks she hears a hint of demand; he won’t let Charlie tell him ‘no’, but he’s too much of a gentleman not to ask.

           

Charlie grunts. “Sure. You saved her.” Wow, real grateful Charlie. He’s standing in the least welcoming posture ever—arms crossed, legs shoulder width apart, hands twitching, eager to ball into fists. If he punched Jasper, his hand would most likely break.

           

“Thank you, Jasper. For everything.” She winks, hoping he catches her drift. “I’m really sorry to make you carry me back all the way to the house, but I really mean it; thank you.” _I love you._ She’d say, if she was braver. If she didn’t fear Charlie barring him from the house forever.

           

She watches Jasper leave, her hands growing cold without his to hold. She feels worse; she feels _old._ Old, like she’s mourning a love that died years ago and left her all alone in the house of her heart with nothing to keep her tethered to the ground. Unconsciously a longing sigh escapes her lips. She could float away, the weight of her visions gone, the burden thrown into the past by Jasper’s strong arms.

           

“Charlie,” Bella begins, tossing her from her reverie. “I’m going to help Alice take a bath. Do you need to shower before?”

           

Charlie shakes his head. “All yours Bells.” He looks once at Alice, before he marches up the stairs to hide in his room, just at the opposite end of the tiny hall from Bella’s.

           

“Do you think he’s mad at me?” Alice asks Bella, nervously. She doesn’t have any place to go if she gets kicked out of here, and not that she considers Charlie to be that mean, but something like running away from the home that graciously took her in seems annoying. And irritable. And ungrateful. And cruel, to poor Charlie, gun in hand, and Bella, fainting at the sight of her bleeding extremities.

           

Bella shakes her head. She’s still pale, colour still lacking in her cheeks, from the earlier fainting episode. “Not really. He’s a man of few words.”

           

“I guess…” Alice says, but trails off. “Sorry, Bella. Really.”

           

Bella sighs, but crosses the living room to sit on the couch next to Alice’s curled up legs. She runs her fingers through that gorgeous curtain of mahogany over and over, the motion like mediation. “Why?” She finally asks, after a long pause.

           

Alice can’t help but hesitate. Where to begin? It’s one thing to believe her when she says she sees the future, it’s another thing entirely to understand the depth of love she feels, the way every cell in her body ran at once to Jasper before she herself, the whole being, could move. How the universe spins around his golden hair, brighter than the sun. “I’m in love Bella, and he wouldn’t have come back if I didn’t chase him.”

           

“He came here?”

           

“Do you believe in fate?” Alice shakes her head, rubbing her hair to create static against the pillow she lays on. “Never mind. You better believe in fate. He was there, Bella, as drawn to me as I was to him. Only I couldn’t stop chasing his soul in my mind, and he must have been following me for months. I saw him around every corner;” the realization is making her grin as she voices it. “and I thought I was crazy, but it must have been him. I saw him outside, my guardian angel in the pouring rain. It was simple; if I let him leave he’d never come back, if I turned away I’d never live a real life, a full life. One that means something. It’d always be empty and lonely. I’d gotten just a glimmer of what the sun felt like, how could I let it run away?”

           

They are both silent for a long time after that.

           

“You love him?” Bella asks at long last, her hand stilled and resting in her lap, her face hidden by her hair.

           

“Always.” Alice responds immediately.

           

“I think I understand.” Bella breaths in and out, in and out, three times. “Do you ever look at someone and think; ‘that’s it. I found it.’?” Her arms come in front of her, offering her palms to some unknown person, some mysterious love that only Bella can see. Alice can feel the heat from her rogued cheeks across the sofa.

           

“Of course.” She responds firmly again.

           

“Jasper talked to me a school, about you. I knew something was up—he never talks to anybody. I didn’t believe him when he said it was all for Carlisle. I wish I had just told him all about you and those dreams—I almost did?” Bella laughs dryly. “I read too much. People like you, people who are special, beautiful, they find love. I’m just… me.” Neither of them cry, but Alice is close to shedding a few tears.

           

“Bella, you’re going to be alright. I promise.” She pulls herself up, so her can reach for Bella’s slumped shoulders. The motion moves many of her scrapes, dragging them along the surface of the couch in an unpleasant manner. “But I’m not beautiful. Maybe I could be, underneath all this mud. Really, it’s a miracle Jasper didn’t leave me in the woods looking like this.” She pulls a strand of her soggy hair from her head. “I read rainwater is good for your skin.” She says loftily. “I’ll be as pretty as Carlisle after tonight.”

           

Even Bella laughs, just enough to be alright, for now.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It happened. I love Jasper. I know it's a little hard to follow what he's thinking and feeling in this scene, but we'll be hearing from him in later chapters that explains a lot more. What did you guys think? I tried to make it as magical and special as they deserved.


	10. Overjoyed?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice wakes up in a perfect dream. (And yells at her future father-in-law)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies, there's no excuse for how late this is. Enjoy.

# Chapter Nine

## Overjoyed?

 

There is an angel sitting on the foot of her bed, gold and white against the purple sheets.

 

Alice drifts in the unknown between awake and resting, floating on a sea of calm waters and falling, slowly spinning, into the great wide ocean. Though her eyes flutter, she can see only the dark of her lashes and the faint purple of the sheets. Nothing to get up for. She is weary, in her state. Half lost in a dream, she wonders if waking is worth it when the sweet smell of summer calls to her. She chooses waking, when she catches a glimpse of white hands, balled into fists.

           

Jasper is crouching next to her, fists resting on the face of the bed, looking away from her.

           

She chose wrong, she misunderstood. Dreaming is her new reality; here she will rest forever, resting in the sweet moment that the dull glow of Bella’s many string lights glints against Jasper’s strong cheekbones. She’ll bask forever in his presence; it’s like being high, only more addictive.

           

“I’m dreaming.” She whispers to him. “And I will never wake up.” She pulls her heavy body to press her face into his stony hand. It’s like embracing marble when he doesn’t move. How powerful must a person be, that they can be touched by another and remain perfectly unchanged? She has only ever been changed by him. The shifting of herself and the world, all because of him, are the only constants she can boast in her short life.

           

He still doesn’t turn to her when he speaks. “Are you alright?”

           

“Perfect.” She gasps, breath drawn out of her by his low voice, the lull to his words that speak to lazy southern afternoons and tea at sunset on a wrap-around porch. He sounds better than he ever did in her visions. Dreaming is so much better—she can catch the frequency in his voice that must’ve been cut off in her visions, lost in the travel of time, that sounds like home.

           

“Good.” He says simply. She cannot see his mouth. He never moves.

           

Alice reaches out for his cheek, and right before she touches him, he snaps up and wraps his hand around her wrist before she can touch him. Frozen an inch from his face, she is suddenly watching his amber eyes (and how bright they are, how they glow like molten gold today) watching her trembling little hand. “My apologies,” He says softly, very gently lowering his hand. Hers stays close to him. “I don’t mean to be rough.”

           

If she was smarter, she’d let her hand fall back into the blankets and leave the wary look he wears alone. Instead, she speaks. “Can I touch you? I have a feeling this is all a lovely dream, and I want to test it.” She reconsiders, looking at the inflamed red scratches on her arms and hand, the scraping on her elbows and her palms. “I don’t, not really. I want to stay here forever.” Her eyes lift from her arms, and she looks at him beseechingly. “But I never can, it never stays. Always behind corners and in shadows and dreams; you never stay.”

           

Her fingers are a hairsbreadth from his face. If he tremored with the minute motions of a person, she’d have touched him by now. He doesn’t move, and she stays millimetres from awake.

           

“I don’t want to wake up. I don’t know why I’m doing this.” She warns herself. “I shouldn’t do this.” She closes her eyes before her warm hand gently cups his cheek. _Parting is such sweet sorrow._ Isn’t that the line from _Romeo and Juliet_? Bella read her some of it, to practice for her English class the other day. But it’s not sweet, it hurts. Tears are welling in her eyes, the thought of another morning alone, another day watching the walls and hoping the shadows form his silhouette. Her hand just presses into that cold skin, wishing he would move and make himself real. Tear himself from the dream and leave her poor heart alone.

           

Nothing happens.

           

“Jasper, I’m not waking up.” The words are scarcely a whisper.

           

“Darlin’, you’re not dreamin’.” Her eyes shoot open. He’s still there.

           

Her face erupts into a grin. “You’re still here!” She hastily pushes herself up, legs stuck in the sea of blankets so it involves a good bit of ungraceful wiggling, and presses her hand into the other side of his face. Sandwiched between her hands, he looks very confused. “This is the best day ever.” She states, very seriously. “Best. Day. Ever.”

           

He chuckles, and leaves her hands as they are. It illuminates the room when he does that, grin that the world is on fire and they are watching from above in heaven, already in the garden of eternity and free from the concerns of the world. Slowly, slow even for her and excruciating for him, he raises his hand to cup her face, leaving them mirrors of each other. His large hand is rough and cool to the touch; it encompasses so much more of her than she can of him. Gently, her thumbs run over the ridges of silvery white marring his cheekbones, and his eyes close softly.

           

Bella interrupts the moment by slamming the door open, a spatula in one hand. “Get away from the bed.” She warns, pointing her spatula at Jasper with a look of determination and utter terror written on her face. “That’s my sister!”

           

Jasper moves instantaneously, shooting across the room. “Sorry, ma’am.”

           

Bella shakes her head. “Did—did you just—what the fuck?” In her pyjamas and thick fleecy socks, she looks ready to kill. And confused. Jasper is silent in the corner, hands stiff by his side and shoulders back, looking at her on the bed, though his chin is up and facing Bella. He’s letting her be in charge here, a sign of respect. Granted, he is in her bedroom and she does feel the push of contentment and happiness eating away at her alarm, and likely Bella’s anger.

           

Bella blinks again, the confusion is her eyes amplifying. Even Alice can feel it, though the brunt force must be slamming into Bella like a tidal wave. She resists the urge to snicker. “I,” Bella pauses and shakes her head, lowering the spatula from an attack position to hanging limply by her side. “am going downstairs before I burn the pancakes. I am so pretending I didn’t see that.” She gives Alice one more vaguely panicked look, before retreating out the door. She pushes it all the way open, so that the knob bangs into the wall, on her way.

           

Alice waits until she hears Bella bang something in the kitchen, from the yelp it must have been her head, before she rounds on Jasper.

           

“Jasper! Now what are we going to tell her?”

           

It’s Jasper’s turn to look taken aback. “She doesn’t know?”

           

“Listen,” She points at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know a lot about anything—but I guarantee you Bella is having a panic attack in the kitchen.”

           

Jasper’s eyes lose their sharp focus on her for a moment. His mouth quirks up. “She’s fine, a lil’ worried. Not hyperventilating.”

           

“You can tell?”

 

He nods. “I can hear her. She’s alright.”

 

“You can hear her breathing?”

           

Jasper gives her a worried look. “Yes.”

           

Alice is confused, and remarkably tired of being so. “Listen, can you just… tell me what you are?” She crosses her legs under the covers and parts the cold side of the bed—Bella’s side—inviting him over. “We can just-” but before she can get out her thought, her eyes roll back into her head and everything is black.

 

           

“Keep low to the ground. Darlin’, huntin’ is easy up north. Nobody ‘round to distract you.” Alice nods, licking her lips. There’s a tawny doe in front of her, eyes dark and relaxed as it nibbles on the green forest around it. “And, go.” Jasper smiles against her neck. She’s glad for the heightened part of her that lets her feel everything that happens, ever in the tiniest of moments, for it takes her a split second to stretch her ivory legs the short two dozen yards and sink her teeth into the deer’s neck. Blood is hot, and the smell overpowering.

           

She feels it coursing through her, and she feels she could drink until she died.

 

 

It is the cold of Jasper’s hand on her face, on her lower back and panic thick in the air of her room that she wakes to. “M’fine.” She mutters, scrunching her face against the sudden dim of the room. “Vision.” Dizziness has settled itself, along with worry, and hint of nausea, in the pit of her stomach.

           

“Breathe, Alice.” He instructs her, the stress beginning to ebb from him.

           

“Is she okay? Alice, are you okay?” Bella says frantically, and she can faintly hear the clink of her bracelet as Bella runs her fingers through her hair, catching her earrings.

           

“I’m fine. Visions. Fine!” With her eyes still pressed closed, she shoots what she hopes is Bella a thumbs up, then limply drops her hand to the bed. “Urgh. I just ate a deer. With my face.”

           

Jaspers hands retract from her face. “Do you foretell, Alice?” Between the twang and the old-fashioned word order, she struggles with the words for a moment.

           

“Foretell.” She states after a moment of deliberation. “Mostly. Sometimes I see the same thing, but it changes slightly.” She’s seen dinner on Wednesday the 23rd of April, a month ahead, three times; once with spaghetti Charlie burned, just him and Bella, with the three of them and a home-made pizza, and herself and Jasper, whispering goodbyes on the front porch as a silver Volvo swings into the driveway.

           

“So...” Alice can hear the wheels in Bella’s head turning. “You’re going to eat an animal, raw?”

           

“Drink.” Alice corrects. Things are coming together slowly, like knitting in slow motion. There’s a word she doesn’t know, something lost to her forgotten memories, that sums it up. Beside her, Jasper is doing his very best to be invisible.

           

“I am going to go downstairs now.” Bella states. “And eat my pancakes. And call Jake, because he is completely normal.” She gives them both a firm nod, white as a ghost, and disappears.

           

The door swings shut and Jasper reappears in the same breath.

           

“What are you?” Alice blurts out, close to grabbing him by the collar and shaking him. “And why did I just eat a deer? Not, like, prepared deer. Just a deer. You were telling me to bite the deer.” He, ironically, looks rather relieved. As if some difficult conversation had been avoided. “Some sort of… animal eating vampire?”

           

Oh no. That last word opens a pit in her stomach.

           

“Yes. We prefer ‘vegetarian’.” Jasper smirks, openly.

           

It shouldn’t be okay. She should be very, very alarmed. Distantly, she is. Her eyes are locked on the ugly purple bedspread, but she reaches out to make a little shooing gesture at Jasper. “Let me have my panic attack.”

           

“Alice.” He says warningly.

           

“Give me half the panic?” She barters. This is, even with seeing the future and all, the most ridiculous thing she’s ever had to experience.

           

His hold lets up, slowly, like a sink overflowing. And oddly, she doesn’t freak out. In makes sense, in some horrible way; the quick movements, the eyes (aren’t they supposed to be red?) the deer, the chasing, the way he freezes, and how she’s never heard his heart before. The mood changes she also attributes to being a vampire, because that is a conundrum she doesn’t wish to dwell on. He is still beside her; she can feel the divot in the bed from his weight. She can’t hear his heart, there is no inhale or exhale; and yet, he is sitting next to her real as ever, hands behind her back. It hadn’t occurred to her to notice before; but the adrenaline in her veins makes the cold feel of his hands beneath her head seem even icier.

           

Well, he hasn’t eaten her yet, and that must be a good thing.

           

The thinking might be a little desperate, but she needs something to cling to. “I get it.” She does. It really, truly, makes sense to her. All the odd things are falling into place, the explanation like the drain being plugged on her overflowing sink of panic.

           

Alice trusts him, implicitly. He’s her sun, shining just a few inches from her. How could the sun be evil? How could she shun him, how could she dare to ever turn her back on the one good thing in her short, objectively terrible, life? He did give her a name, and he did save her all those nights in the hospital.

           

A memory seals the deal. A memory of a vision, clouded with dust from the shelves of her mind, but easy to recall nonetheless. Of Jasper with vicious fangs, soothing her as fire eats her up as she dies. How she burns to death then and there, the only true thing she’s ever held in life trying desperately to ease her into the hell of it all. He had lain in the grave with her, an angel fallen from heaven and scarred bitterly for it, screaming as his curse wouldn’t let him cry. He can never feel like she does, never let the clouds peel back the sun and step outside. Because in the sun he is like a fractured diamond.

           

One thought, of him calling out her name in a desperate prayer, with his arm broken off clean at the shoulder.

           

“I trust you.” Alice tells him, looking those dizzying golden eyes dead on. His tells stories of a lifetime, more than a lifetime, of sadness and worry.

           

And she can’t fix that, but she will try.

           

“I trust you. Deep down, I knew something was different about you. And Carlisle too. Did he ever tell you about my visions? It was such a peaceful moment, just sitting in front of this great glass wall.” Her hands have begun to speak for her, spreading out like the rays of light that hit the glass fortress. “We, you and I, were just sitting there. When the sun hit…” She loses the words for the thrill that he had given her.

           

“I’m a monster.” Jasper spits out, breaking her reverie.

           

“What? No.” She objects. “You were beautiful!”

           

He shakes his head, waves of golden hair flying everywhere. “Esme, Edward, Rosalie? Sure. Emmett and Carlisle too, they’re all lovely. I’m all marred.” Dr. Cullen skin had the same whiteness as Jasper’s, only smoothed over.

           

She can’t fix this, but she will try. And keep trying, forever.

           

“I like you better this way.” Her hands lift to his face and trace his strong jaw, feel every mark that dimples his skin and every scar that he hates so much. “You have a story.”

           

“I have too many stories, darlin’.” Is all he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Eventually, Alice’s stomach rumbles and they’re forced stop staring at each other and walk downstairs. Well, Jasper sweeps her off her feet before she can even think of getting up herself and it is _absolutely the best moment of her life,_ and sets her down at the tiny kitchen table.

 

Carlisle makes an appearance half way through the most awkward breakfast of all time; Bella has an obvious bump on her head from falling earlier and Alice had to keep smothering her laughter, Jasper looks like a brick wall painted in the likeness of a really handsome blond, and Alice’s… derriere, for delicacy’s sake, is bruised and she keeps wiggling in her seat in vain search of comfort. Great. She loves it! Jasper keeps shooting her glances out of the corner of his eye, and his hand is up on the table, resting on its side. If she isn’t wrong (and she usually isn’t) he’s imagining her little hand slipping into his. She sighs. What a lovely picture their hands make. If it wasn’t for the knife Bella had firmly planted in her hand and the horrified glances she keeps giving them across the table, Alice would be enjoying the meal.

           

The doorbell rings and Bella shoots up to get it, banging her knee on the underside of the table. “Coming!” She cries, clutching her knee and hopping for a minute. “Damn.” She mutters under her breath. Thankfully, she makes it to the door without further incident, and seems delighted by their guest. Or, their new guest. Alice can’t forget Jasper, after all. “Dr. Cullen.” Bella greets warmly, pulling the door to let him in. “I just made pancakes, would you like some?”

           

“Carlisle?” Alice shouts, the wicked gleam in her eyes making worry radiate off Jasper. She swats him, confident in her ability to create chaos. “You’re a jerk! You never told me Jasper was so handsome—how could you!” She cries, waving a fist in the air. The gesture is dulled by the presence of a syrupy knife, dripping onto the table, in her hand, but it seems threatening enough regardless. Quick as a lion pouncing, Jasper pulls the knife from her hand and sets it on the plate. “Thanks, Jasper.”

           

He nods, worry not lessening at all.

           

Carlisle chuckles, pulling off a long black raincoat and hanging it on a peg by the door. “Thank you for the offer Bella, but Jasper and I had breakfast together, with the rest of the family, this morning. Alice, lovely to see you.” Alice waves her fork-less fist at him. “I came to check on your injuries, although you seem to be healing just fine. How is the bruising on your legs?”

           

She gives him an unimpressed look. “I look like I ran away, ran into a tree, got into a fight with the tree, and then got carried home by a handsome and mysterious stranger because the tree won.” She winks when she says ‘mysterious’. If Carlisle doesn’t understand how much shit he’s going to get for keeping Jasper from her all those months, he will soon.  “Also, I can’t really walk. Jasper carried me downstairs.”

           

The doctor bends to her feet, pressing his perfect black slacks into the swept, but slightly dirty nonetheless, kitchen floor. He grips her cut up foot in his hands, turning it over. She hisses, his skin too cold on the red inflamed cuts and slices. “This appears to have worsened, from last night. Did you apply the antibiotic cream I recommended?”

           

Bella has poured the doctor a coffee, and now she sits down in the third chair at the kitchen table hesitantly. Perhaps hoping that Dr. Cullen will get off the floor, and that Alice will stop teasing him.

           

Alice rolls her eyes instead, hell-bent on giving him his due payment of bullying. “No, because my back is bruised and I can’t bend over.”

           

“This could become infected if left untreated.” Dr. Cullen gives her a patient, but warning, look from under his lashes. “It’s very important that you keep these clean and regularly disinfect them. Bella, would you be willing to help?” Bella nods, despite Carlisle’s gaze still boring into Alice’s eyes. What does he think he’ll discover there? She knows all about him and his little human charade (though, being a doctor and constantly surrounded by bleeding people seems… worrisome. Come to think of it, she’s been bleeding around Jasper all the time. Literally.) and isn’t afraid of him. Bring it on, Dr. Cullen.

           

“Bella says ‘yes’.” Jasper repeats, allowing Alice the chance to blink from the staring contest she and Carlisle had been occupied with.

           

“Thank you Jasper. That reminds me; Edward and I were going up to Seattle, looking for a gift for Esme’s birthday. I had hoped to pick you up here and be on the road before the rain worsens.”

           

It is Bella, uncharacteristically, who speaks next. “Is Edward here?” She squeaks.

           

“In the car, yes. Do you need him?” Carlisle asks, brows drawn in. Bella is whiter than he is, and ready to bolt.

           

“Oh no.” She mutters.

           

“Bella, what’s wrong?” Alice demands, looking across the table to her sister, shaking in fear.

           

“He hates me, I—I have to go, uh, wash my hair.” She sprints from the table, tripping over the too-long legs of her sweatpants on her way up the stairs and falling with a solid thud, before she scuttles into the bedroom and slams the door.

           

“What was that about?” Alice blinks rapidly, staring at Carlisle. That had to have been the fastest she’s ever seen Bella move, flying up the stairs like that.

           

Jasper and Carlisle exchange a look, and a thought occurs to her. If he’s immortal, like vampires are supposed to be, how old is Carlisle? She’d found him oddly young when she’d first seen him, and the cheeky look in his eyes only heightens the fact. He looks like a mid-twenties college student who’s seen too much of the world. “Edward has… a concerning reaction to Bella’s presence. Some might call it volatile.”

           

Jasper leans across the table and winks at Alice. Her heart briefly stops, then skips back to life. She wants to personally thank whatever god blessed the earth with his face. In the grey light of the rainy world outside, he is inhumanly lovely. “So… he hates her?” She asks the darkest part of the rim of Jasper’s eyes.

           

“What Carlisle is sayin’ is that Edward is in love with Bella. And wants to bite her.” Jasper answers.

           

“Wait—hold on. Bite her?” She demands, taken aback by the nonchalance in his voice.

           

“Eloquently put, Jasper.” Carlisle reprimands. “Bella’s blood is simply stronger to him than most, and he finds it difficult to be around her.” Alice nods, pretending this all makes sense. “Rest assured, if he was in any danger of hurting her, we would intervene.”

           

Jasper cuts in. “Edward, like me, is lil’ special.” Delight washes through her, and she giggles. “He can read minds.”

           

Will she ever cease to be amazed? “Wow, that’s… strange.”

           

Carlisle nods, solemnly. He seems to have given up completely on saving the family secrets. “It can make life at home very difficult.”

           

“At least neither of us needs to listen to Rosalie and Emmett.” Jasper says, quirking his head to Carlisle. They both shudder.

           

“Let me guess, Rosalie is the other blond?” Carlisle looks at her intensely, a mix of worry and admiration. “I saw your phone case, Carlisle. Not the future.” She shuts him down, enjoying the slightly sheepish look in his eyes.

           

He blinks up at her, still beside her feet. “My apologies.” He pulls a long strip of white gauze from his bag and wraps it round and around her feet until she looks like a sad quarter-mummy. “Please, Alice, refrain from ripping up the soles of your feet again. Feet are important for humans.”

           

Alice blinks.

           

So does Jasper.

           

Then he chuckles, and Alice bursts out laughing. “Feet are important?” She repeats, laughter choking the words in her throat. “Carlisle, are you sure people buy the whole human charade?” She taunts, Jasper’s infectious humour spreading about the kitchen. Even Carlisle gets in on the jest.

           

“I’m three hundred eighty-something years old, and I’ve been around for almost every breakthrough in modern medicine. If anyone knows that feet are important, it’s me.” He states in his best and most serious doctor voice.

 

“Wow, you’re old.”

 

Carlisle barely refrains from rolling his eyes. She can see him twitching. “Most of us are well over a hundred, Alice.”

           

“I’m the second oldest in years,” Jasper tells her. “third oldest by age changed.”

           

Alice puzzles over it for a moment; the gleeful looks in their eyes when they teased Edward, the sheer depth of knowledge that Dr. Cullen held (she’d never seen him reference a book or google anything, ever, and she’s been treated by him a lot), and most importantly, the undeniable youth and beauty in his face. “If Jasper is in high school, and you can’t be that much older… 25?” She guesses, looking between them intensively. If she didn’t know better she would think they were really related, cousins, or brothers if she squinted her eyes.

           

“Twenty-three.” Carlisle responds with a smirk. “Speaking of high school, any more injuries and I’ll remind Charlie that you’re supposed to enrol in school.” He snarks at her, but the threat is empty. She’s read some of Bella’s school work; it doesn’t seem hard, and she’d like to be around Jasper more.

           

“Can you even get a medical license?” She quips back. From the corner of her eye, Jasper shakes his head. “How old are you, then?” She asks of her angel.

           

“Twenty.” He responds quickly, stiffening from the microscopic relaxation she’d seen a moment ago. Damn her—why does she always ask stupid questions?

           

Carlisle nods solemnly. “Edward and Rosalie both see me as a father figure, but Jasper and I are more like cousins.” He smiles, lighting up the room. “It all depends on who’s in the room, how our little family falls into place. Rosalie and Edward, my youngest, tend to require the parental discipline and role model. I find it a worthy challenge.

 

 

“Listen, Edward, I know you know who scratched my car!” The imposing blond girl is yelling, fist in the wall next to the face of a teenage boy, sporting an absolute mop of bronze hair and looking thoroughly disinterested.

           

“So?” He challenges, raising one thick eyebrow. Even with the unnatural pallor of his skin, she can see a hint of a warm skin tone, the thick eyebrows, slightly arched nose, and strong jaw that speak to some distant Grecian roots. He is splendid, challenging the vengeful blond. They look like Greek gods preparing for battle; Aphrodite cruelly beautiful and staring down the unfazed youth of Hermes.

           

“That.” The blond whispers, pulling him by his hair. “Was a gift.”

           

They stare at each other for a moment, lightening sparking between their hateful eyes. On the side lines, she and Jasper exchange a look. The half-light shows him unworried, and masks the humour in her eyes. Sometimes, knowing the ending to a scenario makes life a series of jokes, and only she knows the punchlines.

           

“It was Bella,” She whispers to Jasper out of the corner of her mouth. “he’s going to tell her it was me.”

           

She tilts her head all the way up to see his chin, and he bends down above her so his front presses into her back and she is arched around him. Her arms run up the length of his torso to wrap themselves around his neck without thought, and her head falls when he nips at her neck, breathing low in her ear. “Let’s run away then, darlin’.”

 

 

“And we’ll both not live to see another day if we don’t get on the road.” Carlisle shoots at him, finally rising from his spot on the floor.

           

“Huh?” She blinks, looking around. Jasper is clenching her hand hard enough to leave a bruise, and she doesn’t mind. “Did I miss something?” He shakes his blond curls. Heat rises to her face at the thought of her latest vision, and she can’t help but glance at his mouth.

           

“’Nother vision?” She nods.

           

Her face twists into a grimace of sympathy. “I think I understand why you’re so mature. Rosalie and Edward sound… difficult.”

           

Carlisle answers. “They can be, as all siblings can be. We all have our troubles to bear, and how we deal with them naturally shapes, and interferes with, personal relationships.” He gives Alice a good glare. It stings of parental disappointment. “On the subject of difficult, Alice, please. No more escapades in the woods.” She frowns, crossing her arms over her chest.

           

“It wasn’t my fault! Doesn’t anybody here believe in fate?” She cries, waving her hands in the air as if imploring fate itself to come down and save her. Honestly, for a bunch of mythical creatures…

           

When she looks up from scowling at her crossed arms, Jasper has the oddest expression on his face. It’s like a smile, but a desperate, sad smile. Like someone is ripping his heart out and stomping on it, tearing the fragments to threads with the heel of a boot. His eyes are dark and lidded, the small smile he wears infinitely loving. Even his face, for its unholy pallor, appears glowing from within with a soft, rose-coloured light. She wants to ask what’s wrong, wants to reach out and touch his hand, touch his face, touch the black parts of his heart and make them glow; but all she can do is hope her face doesn’t bear the same expression. Alice pulls back her emotions consciously, reigning in her heart with strong iron ropes. If her Jasper is sad, it’s her job to fix it, not wallow around in her own stew of misery whilst he suffers beside her. He never blinks, so there is no telling how long she’s wandered around the labyrinthine maze of his eyes.

           

“Stay safe, Alice.” He whispers at last, and vanishes, Carlisle just behind him.

           

Alice hears the car doors slam and the squeak of too fast driving; she sits in the kitchen chair and runs her thumb back-and-forth across her wrist.


End file.
